The women who paint Jharkhand: Sohrai-Khovar's journey from harvest ritual to global gallery

Sohrai-Khovar, an ancient women-led art tradition from Jharkhand (Image: TWAC)

A local artisan crouches by her doorstep, her hands stained with mud and colour drawn straight from the earth around her. The warmth of rust red, the hush of chalky white, the depth of a black gone nearly charcoal. With nothing more than a broken comb and a steady hand, she draws a peacock on a wall still damp from its coating of clay. In a few hours, this wall, like thousands of others across Hazaribagh, will carry the story of the land of Jharkhand, a mural to its beauty.Sohrai and Khovar paintings are a unique and tribal style of art originating from caves of Jharkhand. In 1991, celebrated and renowned environmentalist Bulu Imam documented rock shelters in the Isco hills of Hazaribagh district and noticed that the motifs on the ancient cave walls closely resembled the paintings still being made on village homes nearbyImam was able to sketch out a connection between the 21st century walls of a home to the Mesolithic and Chalcolithic caves of 10,000 to 5,000 BCE. Other researchers, citing the Archaeological Survey of India, place the rock art closer to 7,000-4,000 BCE, in the Paleolithic period.The dates might be contested but what remains true is that Sohrai and Khovar painting represent one of the longest continuously practiced visual art traditions on the subcontinent, a line running from cave wall to mud wall across several thousand years.

Ganju Sohrai painted house (Source: TWAC)

Sohrai was originally a season specific craft style painted around the harvest festival of the same name, celebrated after Diwali in the month of Kartik, when households give thanks to their cattle and to the land.

Inside of a Khovar room (Source: TWAC)

Khovar, the word draws from “kho,” meaning cave, and “var,” meaning groom, is painted for weddings, decorating the room where a newly married couple will spend their first nights together.Both styles of art are made almost exclusively by women. Even its heritage tracing follows matrilineal succession, passed down from mothers to daughters. Traditionally it is classified as a Ma-Beti Parampara, with techniques passed down orally rather than written down.

Sanjeev Kumar (IFS), principal chief conservator of forests and head of forest force for Jharkhand, has spent much of his career working alongside these villages. He offers a structural explanation for why this art form became a livelihood tool in the first place, rather than staying purely ceremonial.Jharkhand’s rural economy runs largely on two crop cycles a year, he points out, which leaves long stretches when women in farming households have little steady work. Between the sowing and the harvest, there is a kind of enforced pause — and in that pause, an entire category of household income simply goes quiet.Painting, once confined strictly to festival and wedding seasons, has increasingly moved to fill exactly that gap, giving women a way to keep earning in the months the land itself has nothing to offer.It isn’t only about income, in Kumar’s telling. Starting in 2007, as Divisional Forest Officer in Dhanbad, he began organising folk art camps to give Sohrai a wider audience, drawing participants from across India and as far as Australia and Bangladesh. The camps followed him through later postings — Jamshedpur, Hazaribagh, and beyond — running until the pandemic forced them online, then resuming after. The same women who might once have sat out the off-season are now, through this ecosystem, training relatives, negotiating with buyers, and travelling to exhibitions. Kumar also frames the work as central to the state’s eco-tourism ambitions.Sohrai-Khovar finally received Geographical Indication status in May 2020, reportedly approved in under nine months, unusually fast for a process that typically takes two to three years. The tag, granted by the Geographical Indication Registry in Chennai, formally recognises the art as unique to the Hazaribagh region, and gave it a marketing foothold it hadn’t had before.The state took the recognition further. Hazaribagh became the first district in Jharkhand to commit to painting all its government buildings with Sohrai motifs — the chief minister’s residence, the state secretariat, Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Airport, railway stations across Ranchi, Dhanbad, Bokaro, and Tata Nagar all now carry the same red-black-white language once found only on village walls. The art has travelled further still: Prime Minister Modi is reported to have gifted a Sohrai painting to President Putin, a livelihood project turned, however briefly, into an instrument of diplomacy.

Painting gifted to Russian President Putin by PM Modi

That visibility has translated into real, traceable livelihoods, in at least some cases. Local organisers connecting artists to buyers report dozens of women directly employed through their networks, hundreds more earning supplemental income in season. Cooperatives built specifically to give village women an alternative to farm labour have carried this work to dozens of international exhibitions across Europe and the US, and increasingly Canada, South Africa, and Japan. Trusts have gone further still — training programmes, small museums, free pigment, and the paperwork that eventually secured the GI tag itself.

Not everyone close to this history agrees the shift toward livelihood has been a clean win. Gustav Imam draws a distinction between his father’s original vision and the state’s current one. Bulu Imam treated Sohrai as fine art from the start — building an exhibition circuit that ran shows in Australia and Europe. The government’s livelihood framing, Gustav argues, risks something narrower: pay an artist per piece for a product and you’ve quietly converted her into daily-wage labour rather than treating her as an artist. He isn’t against commercialisation itself; he simply thinks dignity has to come first, and that dignity requires recognition at the very top of the field, not just income at the bottom. Traditions like Madhubani, Warli, and Gond painting have each produced nationally awarded artists, Padma Shri recipients among them; Sohrai-Khovar has not, despite women keeping the tradition alive through real struggle and real limitation. Until a handful of individual artists receive that kind of recognition, he argues, younger painters have no one concrete to aspire to become.

Gangwa’s Lotus – archival art (Source: TWAC)

He also offers a blunt estimate on the schemes meant to help: of the artisans meant to benefit from government portals and initiatives like Mudra loans, perhaps 5 to 10 percent actually do, largely because many are semi-literate and simply can’t navigate the registration process. The rest, in his account, remain outside the system entirely, not excluded by design, but by a bureaucracy that was never built with them in mind.Coal mining is often folded into this story as a single, simple threat, but the picture splits in two once you look closely. The Isco rock art site itself, the discovery that started everything, has not been destroyed. Dust from nearby mines has crept close and settled on it, but the site was declared a national monument around 2023. Other rock art caves in the region, more than a dozen now identified, remain safe largely because, in his words, no one knows about them, obscurity standing in for conservation.

Pashupati by Kunti Devi (Source: TWAC)

The villages are a different story. The North Karanpura coalfield sits beneath a large number of tribal villages across Hazaribagh, Ramgarh, and Chatra, and coal projects in the area have displaced multiple villages over the years, acquiring significant stretches of agricultural land in the process. Residents who’ve lost land describe rebuilding elsewhere, often some distance from where their families had always lived; local activists warn that further mining could displace still more. Bulu Imam’s decades of opposition — intellectual rather than confrontational, built on letters to officials rather than protest, work that earned him the Gandhi International Peace Award in 2012 — was never really about the rock art surviving. It was about whether the people who kept painting around it would get to stay.There is another complication that has nothing to do with mining. Since 2018–19, a central housing scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana, has replaced mud-and-thatch homes across rural India with brick and cement — a genuine welfare improvement. But Sohrai and Khovar are painted on mud, and the same pigments don’t take to cement the same way. One arm of government is quietly removing the canvas that another arm is simultaneously celebrating, not through malice, but through two policies that were never built with each other in mind.

The most important complication was hinted at earlier. The market for Sohrai-Khovar remains thin, prices stay low relative to the labour involved, and no fixed floor price exists to stop buyers from talking artists down. Imam suggests that the district administration consider setting a standard pricing for the art to battle some aspects of the issue.The proposed fix, in Gustav’s telling, isn’t more schemes. It’s status. He points to what happens when a piece lands somewhere with real institutional weight — a Sohrai painting, sold to the American ambassador during a visit to Kolkata, now hangs in a prominent hall at the US consulate.Contemporary Indian art by named painters routinely sells for crores; indigenous art too deserves a seat at that table. A tradition this old survives not just on income, but on being taken seriously by the people who could otherwise walk past it without a second look.The artisan finishes her peacock as the light starts to fade. Somewhere else in Hazaribagh, another woman is doing the same. Her red may no longer come from soil gathered by hand, but from a tube of paint bought at the market. The image on the wall is still recognisably Sohrai.

For thousands of years, the art has adapted to changing walls, changing materials and changing lives. But preserving it may require more than putting its motifs on government buildings or selling its paintings to new markets. It may mean preserving the women who make it, the homes they paint and the communities that taught them how.The paintings began on cave walls, moved to mud homes and have now travelled to airports, exhibitions and diplomatic gifts. What happens next will depend on whether Sohrai-Khovar is treated simply as a product to be sold — or as a living tradition whose value lies in the people who keep painting it.