At the Vaidehi Utsav exhibition, on view at the Civil Services Officers Institute in New Delhi, Mithila art’s bold, meticulous lines lend shape to a figure who has long been flattened by scripture and state alike. Organised by the Madhubani Literary Festival and curated by Savita Jha, the exhibition sets out to reimagine Sita—not as the obedient consort of Ram, but as a figure of agency, discernment, and philosophical depth. Across the works, she appears in multiple incarnations: wife, yogini, spectral form, and silent witness. In one painting, she has no mouth. In another, she meditates alone in exile. Invoking a vocabulary of sacrifice and silence that often feels less like subversion and more like surrender.
In a political and commercial landscape where indigenous art is often sidelined or strip-mined for aesthetic novelty, Vaidehi Utsav makes a vital claim: Mithila artists deserve a platform, and their reinterpretations of sacred figures can resist both western feminist readings and state-sanctioned pieties. The result is a sprawling visual conversation across time, faith, and geography. All works here are by living indigenous artists, many of whom challenge the sanitised, auspicious imagery long associated with Mithila painting.
Shivam Chaudhary, a young artist from Darbhanga, Bihar, captures this turn. “Mythology has been the integral part of Mithila community representations,” he explains, “but it has been limited to either the scenes of Jai Mala or the Vivah of Ram and Sita.” Such scenes, he says, are favoured for their moral messaging and auspicious associations. But Chaudhary breaks with that tradition. His paintings reimagine episodes that are more uncomfortable and often left out of indigenous art: Sita’s Agni Pariksha, her bold destruction of Sahasraravana in Adbhuta Ramayana, and her neglected grahapravesh into Ayodhya. “Generally, if you look at Mithila paintings, you won’t find Agni Pariksha,” he says, gesturing to a work where Sita is presented boldly sitting in the fire.
These moments mark the show’s most potent gestures. They pull Sita away from her usual sanctity and instead sketch her in conflict, in exile, and in fury. Yet, despite its visual innovation, Vaidehi Utsav often stops short of narrative risk. The exhibit opens up alternate readings of Sita, from Mahakali to Yogini to voiceless rebel, but still returns, too often, to her status as dutiful wife and moral symbol.
Jha herself insists that this project must begin from within tradition. “I would like to start my Indic feminism understanding right from Sita, not from modern, 18th or 19th-century feminism,” she says. “She has plenty to give, we must imagine her agency”. This refusal of Western chronology is welcome. But in practice, the exhibit often reads less like a feminist reclamation and more like a devotional retelling—one that affirms the canon even as it colours outside its margins.
One of the exhibition’s central philosophical reframings is the division between maya (apparent reality) and satya (ultimate reality). Chaudhary’s work visualises this tension: “I have tried to present through the story of Sita and Ram these two sorts of realities… The apparent reality shows the episode of Lakshman leaving Sita, but the ultimate reality is Vishnu and Lakshmi together on Sheshnag.” In other words, the trauma is temporal. The divine couple remains united, no matter what plays out in mortal time. This might offer comfort, but it also subtly neutralises her suffering. It begs the question, if all pain is an illusion, why bother centring it?
The standout works do hint at deeper subversions. One depicts Sita’s lips erased, a nod to her chosen silence. “We forget that silence has a lot of strength, I want to show her agency,” Jha says. Another shows Sita meditating in Lanka, unmoved by her surroundings, rebranded as Yogini. Still others channel her rage, her divinity, her maternal tenderness. These depictions often embed local rituals into mythic scenes: aripan patterns under Sita’s feet, bamboo baskets in her wedding procession, herbs in her firewalk. The fusion of sacred text and regional practice reveals how Mithila art functions, not just as illustration, but as living theology. “We are not doing [this] purely for commercial purposes,” Chaudhary notes. “We were very particular to present certain themes, aspects of her life and our tradition that have never come together before on canvas.”
This is where Vaidehi Utsav is at its strongest: when it allows the artists’ vernacular to stretch the canon, to borrow from ritual in order to revise myth. The feminist argument may remain somewhat subdued, but the cultural intervention is striking. Rather than rejecting tradition, these works revise it from within, recoding the familiar through local practice, memory, and pictorial resistance.
Still, the show's name invites further thought. Naming the exhibition ‘Vaidehi ' and centring it on ‘Sita’ ties the collection to the Sanskritic canon and risks erasing the very regional and indigenous goddesses from whom Sita may have emerged. Hinduism’s polytheism has long absorbed indigenous faiths, reassigning their stories to pan-Indian avatars. While Chaudhary and other artists incorporates Mithila rituals into their paintings, the overarching narrative still flows toward a monolithic consolidation.
Despite these contradictions, in an art market that prizes the exotic over the ethical, where galleries appropriate Indigenous motifs without crediting their cultural frameworks, or worse not consider them ‘valuable’ at all, exhibitions like this matter. But they must go further. To truly represent the breadth and nuance of Mithila art and reinterpret a figure as sanctified as Sita requires not only aesthetic attention but structural reckoning. Vaidehi Utsav opens a necessary conversation, but it also reminds us how much further the art world must travel to make space for indigenous living traditions on their own terms.
