TL;DR: Madhubani, or Mithila painting, began as wall art made by women in homes in northern Bihar. Two other well-documented traditions grew in a similar everyday setting: Petrykivka painting in a Ukrainian village, inscribed by UNESCO in 2013, and amate painting on bark paper by Nahua artists in Mexico, which draws on an older Indigenous…
TL;DR: Genuine Indian folk paintings are built from brush, pigment and a prepared surface, so a magnifier usually shows ridges and wobbly lines, while a print shows a flat, regular dot pattern. Natural pigments, handmade paper or cloth, and GI registration are useful clues, but modern artists often use ready-made colours, and a signature can…
Bengali Patachitra is the scroll-painting tradition of West Bengal, where Patuas paint and sing stories from Hindu epics and folklore.
Puanchei is the colourful handwoven wrap-around cloth of Mizo women, worn at weddings and festivals and GI-tagged in 2019.
The pichkari is the hand-held water squirter of Holi, used for centuries, from bamboo and horn to metal and plastic.
Sohrai and Khovar are Jharkhand’s tribal wall paintings, made by women with natural pigments to mark harvest and weddings.
Kumaon’s folk art spans Aipan painting, Golu Devta images, folk songs, dances and drama from the Himalayas of Uttarakhand.
Aipan is a ritual folk art of Kumaon, Uttarakhand, made with white rice paste on red geru, used to mark festivals and life events.