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Contemporary Socio-Cultural Issues in Recent Mithila Paintings

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Contemporary Socio-Cultural Issues in Recent Mithila Paintings Socio-Cultural Issues in Recent Mithila Paintings | 8 Social Inquiry: Journal of Social Science Research 2019, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 8-27 Open Access DOI: https://doi.org/10.3126/sijssr.v1i1.26913 Article History: Received: 12 January 2019; Revised: 16 June 2019; Accepted: 5 July 2019 Original Article Contemporary Socio-Cultural Issues in Recent Mithila Paintings Santosh Kumar Singh Sainik Awasiya Mahavidyalaya, Bhaktapur, Nepal Email: [email protected] 0000-0003-3681-4973 Abstract This article examines how Mithila art functions as a window to Maithili values and its current innovations in the field which notes the change both in society and the canvas. Two illustrious contemporary Mithila painters, Rani Jha from India and S. C. Suman from Nepal, shows how Mithila art has swerved from traditional motifs and themes to the on-going socio-cultural and socio-political issues even as the aim of painting is commercial, that is, to earn money by making the art saleable among foreign tourists and art lovers. While Rani Jha mostly © The Author 2019. ISSN: 2705-4853; e-ISSN: 2705-4861 9 | S. K. Singh highlights women’s issues, Suman remains engaged with Nepal’s volatile political situation which sometimes makes him pessimistic and sometimes optimistic. It also makes the point that Mithila painting is largely women-centred, despite the hold of patriarchy. The one, controlling, socio-semiotic meaning of Mithila art is that it is an expression of women’s assertiveness and agency of their subjectivity within the Lakshman Rekha drawn by Maithili patriarchy. The objective of this research is to show how the geographically confined Maithili drawing happens to communicate larger issues at national and global levels at a fresh time. And to prove the main argument, this study makes use of the theoretical framework of socio- semiotic analysis. A semiotic analysis of the artwork in the light of the specific socio-cultural contexts of Mithila reveals that the art not only alerts and modifies the mindset of the stakeholders but also visualizes the socio-cultural troubles of the existing era. Keywords: S. C. Suman; Rani Jha; feminist agenda; hope; despair Introduction makes him pessimistic and sometimes optimistic. Of late, Maithili artists have been going beyond the traditional art-forms, traditional Moreover, due to the lack of industrialization motifs, and conventional styles. Two and unemployment problem, people are considerations—the commercial (Das, 2013) desperately in a search of household industry and the socio-political interests—have like Mithila painting. Because of work started to inform the contemporary renditions migration of male counterparts, women have (Das, 2013; Szanton, 2017; Thakur, 2017). a kind of mental pressure and have to depend Paintings from below—the low and the lower on themselves for the regular economic castes—have been competing with the crisis. However, this has proved a boon for productions from the upper-caste (Szanton, Mithila painting that reveals lots of hidden 2017; The Charticle, 2018). In Nepal, social problems. Individual artists observe particularly, current national and regional his/her community and the local issues even politics have caught the attention of some of happen to highlight the global ones. In this the artists. As democratization at the popular regard, Jha, Bsaies, and Zirnis (2018) assert, level has gained in pace, so responsiveness of “Although this used to be exclusively a lower Mithila art to the on-going socio-political caste issue, upper castes are now changes and challenges has been on the rise. experiencing the same pressures created by Among several prominent artists, Rani Jha under or unemployment” (para. 6). The from India and S.C. Suman from Nepal are family members of migrant workers both in the two exemplary painters whose works India and Nepal face certain social express amenability to the on-going changes constraints that add further complications to and challenges on both sides of the border. a difficult situation. And this socio-cultural While Rani Jha mostly highlights women’s troubles somersault day by day because of issues, Suman remains engaged with Nepal’s unrest political turmoil. The contemporary volatile political situation which sometimes Mithila paintings not only hover around these Social Inquiry: Journal of Social Science Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2019 Socio-Cultural Issues in Recent Mithila Paintings | 10 burning problems of common folks but also with the pragmatic concern at local and alert the concerned people for possible national level. The purpose of this paper is to solutions. highlight artists as agents which not only revolutionize the mental set up of the The rationale behind this research work is to traditional society through their indigenous visualize the current content of Mithila works of art but also hone their skills of painting which roots itself deeply in the local artistic creation. community and equip as well as ornament Coast. Signs have diverse meanings in Methodology diverse social and cultural contexts. Thus, socio-semiotics is socio-centred, going from The analytical framework comes from socio- context to text, not from text to context. semiotics which re-orients mainstream semiotic analyses of sign systems towards Social semiotics investigates the social inclusion in discourse and social change in dimensions of meaning which are shaped by what is called the method of social semiotics. relations of power. So any cultural products, Social semiotics embraces meaning-making including literary works and artworks, are not as a social practice (van Leeuwen, 2005), that merely media of social meaning but also of is to say, it studies signifying practices in power dynamics. It is the contestation of the specific socio-cultural circumstances. In power relationships from which evolves other words, Lemke (1990) defines socio- ideology. About such an evolution of semiotics as: ideology, Hodge and Kress (1988) observe: a synthesis of several modern approaches To capture the contradiction to the study of social meaning and social characteristic of ideological forms, we action. One of them, obviously is will talk of ideological complexes…. An semiotics itself: the study of our social ideological complex exists to sustain resources for communicating meanings. relationships of both power and … Formal semiotics is mainly interested solidarity, and it represents the social in the systematic study of the systems of order as simultaneously serving the signs themselves. Social semiotics interests of both dominant and includes formal semiotics and goes on to subordinate. (p. 3) ask how people use signs to construct the life of a community. (p. 183) Social semiotics supports a dialectically mediated approach that calls for a As every community is unique, the signs used multidimensional and complex by one community are likely to be unlike understanding of the interplay between those used by another, for instance, in much agency and structure, between lived human of Asia, including South Asia, red is the experience and the social power relations to traditional colour for a wedding dress which literary works or artworks are linked. (symbolizing joy and reproduction) whereas It aims at elaborating a new mode of analysis it is a mourning dress for people in Ivory Social Inquiry: Journal of Social Science Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2019 11 | S. K. Singh that places more emphasis on the roles of ‘under what circumstances’ and ‘with what socio-cultural contexts and the accosting modalities’. Logonomic systems as power conflict and resistance which not only define the identity of the community but ideological complexes “reflect contradictions which ultimately point toward a and conflicts in the social formations” transformation of the society. (Hodge & Kress, 1988, p. 5).When a logonomic system tolerates, for instance, a Processes of struggle and resistance, which statement insulting to women to be read as a shape the transformation of a society, have a joke, it refers to a male-dominated structure bearing on every level of semiotic systems, at of the society. the smallest level of which “power is put to the test in very exchange, and the logonomic Similarly, if a society, as does Mithila, puts system is typically a record of this” (Hodge up with female infanticide, this means, it is a & Kress, 1988, p. 8). The logonomic male-dominated society and a female writer system—a set of rules prescribing the or artist may be highly critical of it. Let us conditions for production and reception of have a basic illustration of the above-outlined meanings—is integral part of an ideological account of socio-semiotics by analyzing the complex as it specifies ‘who’ claims to following painting (Figure 1) by a initiate or know meanings about ‘what’ topic contemporary Madhuani painter, Rani Jha: Figure 1: Rani Jha's female infanticide (Source: http://peterzirnis.com/post/58303202722/rani- jha-feminist-perspectives-in-mithila-art). Social Inquiry: Journal of Social Science Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2019 Socio-Cultural Issues in Recent Mithila Paintings | 12 Rani Jha’s “Female Infanticide” painting, The socio-semiotic approach to the analysis displayed on a tableau on a large scale, of Mithila painting gains in legitimacy from evokes more a theatrical scene rather than a the central argument of a book like Reading naturalistic illustration. The choice of the Images: The Grammar of Visual Design by tableau immediately points to one set of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). The book logonomic rules: the dramatic-ironic makes the point that the visual is an organized intensity of the unnatural behaviour. With and structured message, connected to the this rule underway, the societal precedence of verbal text but not dependent on it. This a boy (shown on a ladder) over a girl contention marks a departure from Roland (depicted by the cobra coiled around her feet) Barthes’s argument in “Rhetoric of the also turns out to be unnatural.
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