Seven ancient artforms that are part of India’s heritage

Our great nation has a rich cultural heritage dating back to thousands of years. Art used to exist even in the days of Harappa and Mohenjodaro. We all acknowledge this information but we truly know how many different styles and varieties of art that we possess in this nation?

Here are seven of our most interesting and unique arts and some cool facts about them :

1: Kathputli 

Kathputli is a string puppet theatre, native to Rajasthan, India, and is the most popular form of Indian puppetry. It is controlled by a single string that passes from the top of the puppet over the puppeteers.

Kathputli performances usually depict folktales and stories. This artform dates back to thousands of years. Characteristic to this form are the shrill voices produced by the lead puppeteer which are spoken through a bamboo reed.

Historically, these puppets were not only a source of entertainment, but also provided moral and social education. The shows tackled problems like the dowry system, women’s empowerment, illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, and cleanliness. These puppet shows made people aware of the social problems that everybody was facing and also showed ways of solving them.

2: Madhubani

Madhubani painting or Mithila painting is a style practiced in the Mithila region of Nepal and in Indian State of Bihar. Painting is done with fingers, twigs, brushes, nib-pens, and matchsticks, using natural dyes and pigments, and is characterized by eye-catching geometrical patterns. There are paintings for each occasion and festival such as birth, marriage, Holi, Durga Puja etc.

According to local mythology, the origin can be traced to the time of the Ramayana, when King Janaka of Nepal ordered his kingdom to decorate the town for the wedding of his daughter, Sita, to Lord Rama.

In 2012, to prevent deforestration, Madhubani artists created colourful masterpeices on the tree trunks of highway number 52. As a result not even a single painted tree was cut and highway number 52 of the Madhubani district has become a well known tourist attraction.

3: Warli

The art created by the Warli tribes living in the mountainous and coastal areas of the Maharashtra-Gujarat border is known as Warli art. Their extremely rudimentary wall paintings use a very basic graphic vocabulary: a circle, a triangle and a square. Their paintings come from their observation of nature, the circle representing the sun and the moon, the triangle derived from mountains and pointed trees. Only the square seems to obey a different logic and indicates a sacred enclosure or a piece of land.

The central motif in these ritual paintings is surrounded by scenes portraying hunting, fishing and farming, festivals and dances, trees and animals. Human and animal bodies are represented by two triangles joined at the tip; the upper triangle depicts the trunk and the lower triangle the pelvis.

The Warli use only white for their paintings. Their white pigment is a mixture of rice paste and water with gum as a binding.

4: Tanjore Paintings

Tanjore painting is a classical South Indian painting style, which originated from the town of Thanjavur and spread across the adjoining country. It originated in the Maratha court of Thanjavur in the 17th century but over time it has soaked up so much culture from wherever it has spread that one can now see the influence of Deccani, Vijayanagar, Maratha and even European or Company styles of painting.

5: Stone-crafting

Stone-crafting has existed in India since thousands of years. Stone-crafting reached its Zenith in India during the Mughal period as the Mughal rulers favoured stone-crafters and encouraged them to showcase their creative excellence by creating intricate architectural masterpieces.

In many places the craftsmen still use chisels and hammers to bring out curved patterns and designs followed by grinding and polishing. The pinnacle of stone-crafting in the world belongs to our county and is none other than the majestic Taj Mahal.

6: Kundan-Meenakari Jewellery

Meenakari is a colorful style of jewellery that has grown during the Mughal era, and was extremely famous with Rajasthan royalty. Over the centuries, Meenakari was mixed with the traditional Rajasthani Kundan style of jewellery, where smooth or uncut stones were set on 24 carat gold jewellery using lac and fine pure gold foils. The result was Kundan-Meena jewellery.

A piece of Meenakari jewellery still goes through the same assembly line of craftsmen as it used to go through about 500 years ago. Traditional Kundan-Meena jewellery has stones covered on one side and colourful and elaborate Meenakari on the reverse.

7: Block Printing

Block printing began in the 18th century in Rajasthan and since then has been passed down from one generation of skilled block printing artisans to the next. It is the ancient art of stamping on fabric with blocks of wood drenched in natural dyes. It can take 5 carvers up to 3 days to create a pattern on the block on which the designs are traced onto the surface and then carved with a hammer and chisel.

In traditional block printing, the blocks are dipped in vegetable dyes made from jaggery, pomegranate peels, indigo etc. This is still followed amongst many block printing artisans. Block printing renders an artistic aura to the fabric which is difficult to replicate with machines.

The artisans may use as many as 25 blocks of design on one saree and it takes at least two hours to block print one saree!