Madhubani — the women-painters' folk tradition of Bihar's Mithila region — turned mud walls into Hindu mythology billboards for at least four centuries. Every figure is outlined twice and filled with parallel hatching; every ground is choked with vine, lotus, fish-scale and bamboo motifs. There is no empty space.

After the 1966 drought drove the All India Handicrafts Board to commission paper paintings for cash income, Sita Devi and her peers carried the tradition into international collections. The discipline is saturated mineral pigment — vermilion, indigo, saffron, lampblack — laid as flat blocks on warm handmade-paper cream, never gradient, never pastel.