Lively Wall Art

Lively — 30 museum-grade prints that set the mood. Aipan is the ritual floor- and wall-art of the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, made traditionally by Kumaoni women with white rice-paste (biswar) drawn by fingertip onto a geru — red-ochre earth — ground. The chholiya is Kumaon's martial sword-and-shield dance, performed by costumed dancers who lead wedding processions to the beat of dhol-damau and the turi-ransingha horns. Sohrai is a harvest-season wall art of Hazaribagh district, Jharkhand, painted by women of tribal and Kurmi communities in natural earth pigments — manganese black, hematite red, kaolin white and ochre yellow — on a daubed mud wall to welcome cattle home after the rice harvest, around Diwali. The forest creatures the communities live among — elephants, deer, peacocks — recur on these walls as a celebration of the wild country around the village. Cheriyal scroll painting comes from Cheriyal village in Telangana's Siddipet district, painted for generations by the Nakashi artist community on a signature red ground. Traditionally these were long cloth scrolls unrolled episode by episode by travelling balladeers who sang epics and caste-origin legends to village audiences, with stacked horizontal registers used for sequential scenes.

Updated 22 Jun 2026