Hélène Fleury, Transnational discursive shifts on Mithila Paintings (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

“Mithila painting” is an umbrella term for ritual/art forms. During the Bihar drought, AIHB encouraged shifting artwork onto paper to generate income, causing socio-aesthetic changes. The resulting globalization coincided with gender/postcolonial studies, deconstructing hegemonic discourses, and male and primitivist canons. The painters/ings narratives undergo a reversal, making visible the overlapping of dominance criteria (gender, caste, class…). Evolution of Mithila art belongs to a connected history involving transnational mediators. Mithila art was a subalternised ritual before commodification. In 1917, Maharaja of Darbhanga assigns no primary function to murals, though the paintings for his daughter’s marriage were sophisticated. They were marginal to male Brahminical values. Guided by upper caste male informants, William Archer documented socalled parallels he saw to modern European art. Even if the reception of his 1949 article reifies a vision of Mithila art based on a stylistic distribution per castes, a collective, anonymous women practice, he was less essentialist than he appears. Nevertheless, his wife Mildred is invisibilized in their common work. Primitivist schemes persist in Vequaud, through a countercultural myth. He positions Mithila art at the heart of a timeless village utopia, casting Mithila as a Lost Eden. He presents painters as prophetic figures within a matriarchal countersociety spread by EMMA magazine. A discourse valuing subalternized minorities emerges by Moser-Schmitt, Ray and Naomi Owens promoting a fair trading system. Moser-Schmitt’s contribution on Mithila artists in Heresies asserts an inclusive radical feminism. Her committed anthropology contributed to the assertion of Dalit women’s identity. Filming and thinking women’s creativity contribute to thwart inequalities. An inclusive feminism emerges early in India with Women's Quest for Power (1980). The shift from a reified vision to its deconstruction has been gradual. The changing of narratives follows global flux and interareal transfers.