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Accepted Paper:

Making Claims to Tradition: Poetics and Politics in the Works of Young Maithil Painters  
Mani Shekhar Singh

Paper short abstract:

Departing from the representation of Maithil painting as a “folk” art form, I explore how young Maithil artists engage with tradition and find their own voice within that tradition. Thereby demonstrating their awareness of aesthetic choices in positing their work as art and not as craft.

Paper long abstract:

Since its "reinvention" on paper as commodity art in the late 1960s, Maithil painting has been presented to the metropolitan art world as a traditional "folk" art, which women inherit and practice within domestic-ritual settings. What is implicit in such a presentation - most clearly articulated in the policies and programmes of the All India Handicrafts Board and its various agencies - is that children and adolescents (as in vast majority of handicrafts) are merely born into a tradition. And, furthermore image-making practise that they inherit cannot be learnt outside its traditional setting. Such emphasis on "authentic" pictorial practice, which also finds resonance in much of the writings on South Asian folk arts and crafts, takes us to the heart of issues related to poetics and politics of inheritance, learning, and art making. Moving away from an understanding in which novices are destined as passive carriers of traditional templates transmitted to them by the older generation, in this paper I embark on a journey in the company of young Maithil painters; a journey that explores how these youngsters find their own voice within that tradition. I will explore how these artists seriously engage and experiment with received knowledge about art making in the process of producing their paintings. Such engagements offer insights into their intentions and motivations, both as individual artists and as members of their communities. And their pictorial activities display their awareness of techniques and aesthetic choices in constituting the paintings not as craft objects but as art work.

Panel P30
Insideout: art crafting substance, (bio)graphy and circulation
  Session 1