The Living Art Traditions of India Class 12: Chapter 8

The Living Art Traditions of India Class 12 chapter — Chapter 8 of NCERT’s An Introduction to Indian Art – Part II — opens on page 126 and runs for 17 pages of the textbook. It is the book’s survey of folk and tribal art: wall and scroll painting traditions first, then clay and metal sculpture. The official NCERT PDF of this chapter is below.

The explanations on this page follow the chapter tradition by tradition, so you can tell Mithila from Warli, and a Pata from a Phad, by the time you finish. This page is maintained for the 2026-27 session.

Download the Living Art Traditions of India Class 12 Chapter PDF

Download the living art traditions of india class 12 chapter pdf from NCERT’s official website, where the complete Chapter 8 of An Introduction to Indian Art – Part II is published free of charge with every page and illustration intact.

It is the official file behind this page, so the page numbers and figure captions cited here match the printed book exactly.

If you prefer to browse the book in your browser, the NCERT textbook page for An Introduction to Indian Art – Part II lets you open every chapter of the same official edition.

What Is Inside This Chapter: Sections, Figures and Exercises

The table below gives the chapter’s shape at a glance — its sections, its figures and its exercise questions — so you know what kind of file you are opening.

Chapter 8 is a narrative chapter. NCERT presents it as a survey of living traditions rather than a problem set, so its value lies in descriptions, vocabulary and illustrations, not in numerical practice.

What This Chapter Covers: Folk Painting and Sculpture Traditions

Before naming any tradition, the chapter answers one question: was there art among common people? Its answer is the whole chapter — yes, practised for centuries in forests, deserts, mountains and villages, for ritual, need and celebration, and passed from one generation to the next (NCERT, p. 126).

The book is careful with labels. Scholars have called these forms minor art, utility art, folk art, tribal art, people’s art, ritual art or crafts, but under any name they carry deliberate motifs, symbolism and an instinctive sense of the beautiful.

NCERT adds that the line between art and craft is thin, since both involve creativity, necessity and instinct (NCERT, p. 126).

The chapter also sets these traditions in a long history: examples reach back to prehistoric cave paintings and to the pottery, terracotta, bronze and ivory of the Indus period; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries modern artists treated them as sources of inspiration; after Independence the handicraft sector was reorganised commercially and displayed in State emporia (NCERT, p. 128).

That openness to traditional forms is the thread later painters picked up again — see the modern Indian art chapter on this site for the continuation.

The chapter’s own survey names more traditions than it can discuss — Mithila or Madhubani of Bihar, Warli of Maharashtra, Pithoro of north Gujarat and western Madhya Pradesh, Pabuji ki Phad of Rajasthan, Pichhwai of Nathdwara, Gond and Sawara of Madhya Pradesh, and Pata Chitra of Odisha and Bengal (NCERT, p. 128). Six of these are explained in detail below.

Painting Traditions of India, Region by Region

This section answers three questions about each tradition: who paints, where, and why. Keep the region and the community attached to the tradition’s name as you read — that pairing is what most questions on this chapter test, and the comparison table at the end lets you check it.

Mithila or Madhubani Painting of Bihar

Mithila and Madhubani are two names for one art. Mithila is the ancient region — old Videha, described in the chapter as the birthplace of Sita — and Madhubani is the nearest district capital, after which the art is also named (NCERT, p. 129).

The painters are the women of the region, who for centuries have painted the mud walls of their houses on ceremonial occasions, especially weddings. The community traces the origin of the art to the marriage of Princess Sita to Lord Rama (NCERT, p. 129).

The paintings, always in bright colours, appear in three areas of the house: the outer courtyard, where armed gods, animals and women at work — carrying waterpots or winnowing grain — are shown; the eastern part, which is the dwelling of the Kuladevi, usually Kali; and a southern room that holds the most significant images (NCERT, p. 130).

The most extraordinary painting is the kohbar ghar, the inner room, where a full-bloom lotus with a stalk — the kohbar, rich in metaphoric and tantric meaning — is painted with gods and goddesses on freshly plastered walls (NCERT, p. 130).

Other themes come from the Ramayana, the Bhagvata Purana, the stories of Shiva-Parvati, Durga and Kali, and the Rasa-Lila of Radha and Krishna. Mithila artists dislike empty spaces: they fill every gap with birds, flowers, animals, fish, snakes, the Sun and the Moon, each carrying symbolic meaning such as love, fertility, eternity or prosperity (NCERT, p. 130).

The medium is modest. Brushes are bamboo twigs with cotton swab, rice straw or fibre attached, and colours were traditionally made from mineral stones and organic sources — phalsa and kusum flowers, bilwa leaves, kajal and turmeric. Today the same imagery is also painted on fabric, paper and pots for sale (NCERT, p. 130).

Warli Painting of Maharashtra

The Warli community lives on the west coast of northern Maharashtra, around the north Sahyadri range, with a large concentration in Thane district (NCERT, p. 131).

Their most important painting is the Chowk, created by married women for special occasions tied to marriage, fertility, harvest and the sowing season. It is dominated by the mother goddess Palaghat, the goddess of fertility, who also represents the corn goddess Kansari (NCERT, pp. 131–132).

Palaghat sits inside a small square frame edged with pointed chevrons that symbolise Hariyali Deva, the God of Plants. Her escort is Panch Sirya Devata, a headless warrior — on a horse or standing beside her — with five corn shoots growing from his neck, who also guards the fields as Khetrapal (NCERT, p. 132).

Around the goddess are scenes of everyday life: hunting, fishing, farming, dancing, mythological animal stories where the tiger is conspicuously visible, and even buses plying and the busy urban life of Mumbai as the Warli see it (NCERT, p. 132).

The technique matches the rural setting: rice flour painted on earth-coloured walls with a bamboo stick chewed at the end as the brush. The paintings promote fertility, but they also avert diseases, propitiate the dead and fulfil the demands of spirits (NCERT, p. 132).

Gond Painting of Madhya Pradesh

The Gonds of Madhya Pradesh have a rich tradition: their chiefs once ruled Central India, and the community worshipped nature (NCERT, p. 133).

In the Mandla region and its surroundings, Gond votive paintings are geometric drawings on the walls of huts, portraying Krishna with his cows, surrounded by gopis with pots on their heads, to which young girls and boys make offerings. More recently the same tradition has taken on a colourful depiction of animals, humans and flora (NCERT, p. 133).

Pithoro Painting of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh

Pithoro paintings are made by the Rathva Bhils of the Panchmahal region in Gujarat and Jhabua in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. They are large wall paintings done on house walls to mark special or thanksgiving occasions (NCERT, p. 135).

Their content is cosmic.

Rows of magnificently coloured deities riding horses represent the cosmography of the Rathvas: the uppermost zone is the world of gods, heavenly bodies and mythical creatures; an ornate wavy line separates it from the lower zone, where the wedding procession of Pithoro appears with minor deities, kings, the goddess of destiny, an archetypal farmer and domestic animals — the earth itself (NCERT, pp. 135–136).

Pata Painting of Bengal and Odisha

Scroll painting on fabric, palm leaf or paper is practised across the country and goes by several names — pata, pachedi, phad. This section follows the two best-known forms, the Bengal pata and the Puri pata (NCERT, p. 137).

Bengal patas are vertical cloth scrolls made to be performed. The patua, also called chitrakar, handles the pata as a hereditary profession; patua communities live around Midnapore, Birbhum and Bankura in West Bengal, with parts of Bihar and Jharkhand.

The patua travels from village to village, displays the painting and sings the narrative to it — three or four stories in each performance — and receives alms or gifts afterwards. This is a deliberately receptive oral tradition, constantly finding new themes in major world events (NCERT, p. 137).

Puri patas take their name from the temple city of Puri in Odisha. Their central themes are the daily and festival veshas (attires) of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra, along with Ansara patti, which substitutes the icons in the Garbhagriha when they are removed for cleaning, and Jatri patti, which pilgrims take home as memorabilia.

Episodes such as the Kanchi Kaveri Pata and the Thia-badhia pata, an aerial-and-lateral view of the temple, belong here too (NCERT, pp. 137–138).

The technique is specific. Patachitras are painted on small strips of cotton cloth coated with soft white stone powder and glue made from tamarind seeds. The borders are made first, then the figures are sketched and flat colours — white, black, yellow and red — applied.

When finished, the painting is held over a charcoal fire and lacquer is applied to make it water resistant and give it a sheen (NCERT, p. 138).

Colours are organic and locally procured: black from lamp black, yellow from haritali stone, red from hingal stone, white from conch shells ground to powder. Palm-leaf manuscripts are drawn on a palm called Khar-taad — not with a brush but incised with a steel stylus, then filled with ink, sometimes tinted with paint (NCERT, p. 138).

Phads of Rajasthan

Phads are long, horizontal cloth scrolls from Rajasthan that honour the folk deities of pastoral communities around Bhilwara. For these communities, whose foremost concern is safeguarding livestock, the gods are cattle heroes — brave men who died protecting the herd from robbers and are remembered as martyrs under the broad term bhomia (NCERT, p. 139).

Famous bhomias include Gogaji, Jejaji, Dev Narayan, Ramdevji and Pabhuji, and they command cult followings among communities such as the Rabaris, Gujjars, Meghwals and Regars (NCERT, p. 139).

The scroll is carried by a bhopa, an itinerant bard who travels the territory displaying it and singing the hero’s deeds. In night-long performances a lamp is held against the phad to light the images being sung about; music comes from instruments such as the ravanahattha and veena, and the singing uses the Khyal style.

The performance — phad banchan — keeps the martyr’s story alive (NCERT, pp. 139–140).

One role matters for revision: bhopas perform, but they do not paint. The phads were traditionally painted by the Joshis, a caste who worked as court painters to the kings of Rajasthan and specialised in court-patronised miniature painting. That association of skilled practitioners, bard musicians and court artists places phads above similar traditions in the chapter’s account (NCERT, p. 140).

The Six Traditions Compared

Use this table to test yourself. It maps each of the six painting traditions to its state, community, medium and purpose, with the NCERT page for each.

To fix the table in memory, reduce each row to one hook:

• Bihar → Mithila/Madhubani: link it to Sita’s wedding and the kohbar lotus in the inner room.
• Maharashtra → Warli: Thane + rice-flour Chowk with the five-headed escort of Palaghat.
• Madhya Pradesh → Gond: Mandla’s geometric hut walls, Krishna with cows.
• Gujarat + western MP → Pithoro: Rathva horse riders, gods above the wavy line, earth below.
• Bengal + Odisha → Pata: vertical scrolls that are sung; Puri means Jagannath’s veshas.
• Rajasthan → Phad: horizontal hero-scroll sung at night by a bhopa, painted by a Joshi.

Sculptural Traditions: Dhokra Casting and Terracotta

After painting, the chapter turns to sculpture in clay, metal and stone — popular traditions found all over the country — and treats two of them in detail: lost-wax bronze casting and terracotta (NCERT, p. 141).

Dhokra: Bronze Casting by the Lost Wax Method

Dhokra is the lost-wax, or cire perdue, casting of bronze — one of the most prominent metal crafts of Bastar in Chhattisgarh, parts of Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Midnapore in West Bengal. The metal craftsmen of Bastar are called ghadwa, a name traced to the act of shaping and creating (NCERT, p. 141).

Traditionally, the ghadwa supplied villagers with utensils of daily use, jewellery, icons of locally revered deities and votive offerings in the form of snakes, elephants, horses and ritual pots. As demand for utensils and traditional ornaments fell, they turned to new and decorative forms (NCERT, p. 141).

The casting process is elaborate, and the order of steps is what you should remember:

1. Knead black riverbank soil with rice husk and water to make the core figure or mould.
2. When the core dries, cover it with a layer of cow dung mixed with clay.
3. Heat resin from the saal tree in a clay pot with some mustard oil until it becomes liquid, strain it through cloth, and let it cool over water — the resin solidifies soft and malleable.
4. Break the resin into small pieces, warm them gently over low coal, and stretch them into fine threads or coils, joining the threads into strips.
5. Overlay the dried clay form with these resin strips, adding all decorative details, eyes and nose.
6. Cover the form in layers: fine clay first, then clay mixed with cow dung, then clay from ant hills mixed with rice husk.
7. Make a receptacle from the same clay and fix it to the lower part of the image; seal a cup filled with metal pieces on the other side with the clay-rice husk mixture.
8. Fire the moulds in a furnace using saal wood or its coal, the metal cup at the bottom, blowing air continuously for about two to three hours until the metal melts.
9. Lift the moulds out with tongs, turn them upside down, give a brisk shake and pour the molten metal through the receptacle — it flows into the space the resin once occupied, since the resin has evaporated.
10. Let the moulds cool, then hammer away the clay layer to reveal the metal image.

Terracotta: The Most Widespread Sculptural Medium

Terracotta is the most ubiquitous sculptural medium in the country. Usually made by potters from local clay found on riverbanks or ponds, terracotta pieces are baked for durability and serve as votives, offerings to local deities, or objects used during rituals and festivals (NCERT, p. 143).

The regions span the whole map: Manipur and Assam in the North-East, Kutch in the West, the northern hills, Tamil Nadu in the South, the Gangetic plains and Central India. Pieces may be moulded, modelled by hand or made on a potter’s wheel, and coloured or decorated (NCERT, p. 143).

Their forms and purposes are often similar: images of gods and goddesses — Ganesh, Durga or a local deity — along with animals, birds and insects (NCERT, p. 143).

Reading the Figures in This Chapter

The chapter is illustrated throughout, and the images are not decoration — each one carries the argument of the section it sits in. Below are the five illustrations whose captions the book supplies, with their NCERT page numbers, so you can read them the way the chapter intends.

This image opens the chapter on NCERT page 127, and its caption is the thesis of the whole chapter: this country’s traditional knowledge has passed, unbroken, from one generation to the next.

Hold onto that caption while revising — every tradition that follows, from the Mithila kohbar to the Warli Chowk to the Rathva cosmography, is offered as one more instance of that inherited knowledge.

The second image belongs to the Gond section (NCERT, p. 132). Its caption gives you the two facts that define the community — Madhya Pradesh, and chiefs who ruled Central India — and the chapter then shows what that tradition paints: votive geometric wall drawings of Krishna with his cows and gopis in the Mandla region (NCERT, p. 133).

This is the most instructive figure in the chapter (NCERT, p. 134).

Read it from top to bottom: the rows of horse riders are the world of gods, heavenly bodies and mythical creatures; an ornate wavy line separates them from the lower zone, where the wedding procession of Pithoro moves with minor deities, kings, the goddess of destiny, an archetypal farmer and domestic animals.

That vertical order — gods above, earth below — is the Rathva cosmos, and it is the order your answer should follow.

This illustration appears with the Pata discussion (NCERT, p. 136). Its printed caption is the book’s running title, so the image carries no descriptive label in the text — treat it as a visual marker for the section and move on to the next figure, which shows what a Bengal pata actually is.

The fifth image is the one to study closely (NCERT, p. 136). Its caption states the essence of the Bengal tradition — painting on cloth and storytelling — and the figure shows the vertical scroll that makes that storytelling possible.

Recall the technique with it: cloth coated in white stone powder and tamarind glue, borders painted first, flat colours, then lacquer fixed over a charcoal fire (NCERT, p. 138).

Key Terms and Definitions from the Chapter

These specialised terms name the rooms, deities, performers and craftsmen of the chapter. They are the vocabulary that answers a question cleanly — a correct term in the first sentence of an answer shows you have the tradition right.

Common Mistakes Students Make with These Traditions

Most errors on this chapter are confusion between traditions that share a name, a scroll form or a performer. Name the mistake before you make it:

How to Read This Chapter for Exams

Questions on this chapter naturally test the same factual recall: who paints, where, and for what occasion. Organise your revision that way, and you will not mix the traditions up.

• Learn a one-line identity per tradition in this order: tradition → region → community → medium → occasion. Example: “Mithila: Bihar; women of the region; mud-house wall painting; weddings; the kohbar lotus.”
• Use the comparison table above as a self-test: cover the Region and Community columns and recall them from the tradition name, then reverse.
• Keep one deity or motif ready per tradition: Palaghat and Panch Sirya Devata for Warli; kohbar for Mithila; horse-rider rows for Pithoro; Jagannath veshas for Puri Pata; bhomia heroes for Phad; Krishna with cows for Gond.
• For Dhokra, be ready to list the lost-wax steps in order — the process is the most technical content in the chapter, and the sequence core → resin details → clay layers → firing → pour → break away the clay is what you should reproduce.
• For revision support across the subject, see the Class 12 fine art notes on this site.

One honest caution: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official syllabus before deciding how deeply to cover each tradition.

The Chapter in One Page: A Quick Recap

Read as one argument, the chapter is simple. It opens with a question — was there art among ordinary people? — answers with six painting traditions and two sculptural traditions, and closes on the idea that these forms, made from local materials for ritual and daily use, carry their own deliberate symbolism, motif and ritual purpose (NCERT, pp. 128, 143).

• Painting half: Mithila or Madhubani (Bihar), Warli (Maharashtra), Gond (Madhya Pradesh), Pithoro (Gujarat and western Madhya Pradesh), Pata (Bengal and Odisha), Phad (Rajasthan).
• Sculptural half: Dhokra bronze via lost-wax casting (Bastar and neighbouring regions) and terracotta (practically everywhere).
• Through line: symbolism, ritual purpose, local materials, and knowledge passed from one generation to the next.

Related Chapters and Book Resources

If this chapter helped you place the living traditions, the rest of the book gives them a frame — as does the rest of this site’s Class 12 material.

• The Class 12 fine art book page — every chapter of An Introduction to Indian Art – Part II in one place.
• Chapter 7, The Modern Indian Art — the chapter that precedes this one in the same book.
• The Class 12 books hub — NCERT books across subjects for Class 12.
• Class 12 CBSE notes — revision material for every subject.
• The main CBSE notes index — the starting point for all notes on this site.

Sources and Data Verification

This page describes Chapter 8 of An Introduction to Indian Art – Part II, the NCERT fine art textbook for Class 12, in its official NCERT edition.

• The chapter outline, page references and figure captions above follow the printed NCERT textbook as published on ncert.nic.in.
• This page covers Chapter 8 only — not the full book, and not the wider CBSE scheme of subjects.
• NCERT is the authority for the textbook, its editions and its official PDFs; CBSE is the authority for the curriculum, syllabus and examinations.
• A chapter in the textbook does not prove that every part of it is examinable this session — the official CBSE syllabus is the authority for what is tested.

Reference: NCERT Class 12 An Introduction to Indian Art Part II textbook, chapter 8, official edition on ncert.nic.in.

FAQ: The Living Art Traditions of India Class 12

What is the difference between Mithila and Madhubani painting?

There is no difference — both are names of the same Bihar tradition. Mithila is the ancient region, the old Videha kingdom described in the chapter as the birthplace of Sita, and Madhubani is the nearest district capital after which the art is also called (NCERT, pp. 129–130).

Where is Warli painting practised and what is the Chowk?

Warli painting is practised by the Warli community of northern Maharashtra, around the north Sahyadri range with a large concentration in Thane district (NCERT, p. 131). The Chowk is the community’s most important painting, made by married women for special occasions — marriage, fertility, harvest and the sowing season.

It is dominated by the mother goddess Palaghat, painted with rice flour on earth-coloured walls using a bamboo stick chewed at the end (NCERT, pp. 131–132).

What is the difference between a Pata and a Phad?

Both are scroll paintings, but they differ in region, orientation and performer. A Pata — especially the Bengal pata — is a vertical cloth scroll whose painter, the patua or chitrakar, sings the story it shows; Puri patas in Odisha centre on Jagannath themes.

A Phad is a long horizontal cloth scroll from Rajasthan that honours bhomia hero-deities; it is carried and sung by itinerant bhopas through the night, but painted by Joshis (NCERT, pp. 137–140).

How is Dhokra metal casting done?

Dhokra is bronze casting by the lost-wax method (cire perdue). The craftsman makes a core from riverbank soil and rice husk, overlays it with fine threads of saal-tree resin that carry the decorative details, covers it in several layers of clay, and fires it with saal wood.

After about two to three hours of continuous blowing the metal is molten and the resin has evaporated; the metal is poured through a clay receptacle into the space the resin once filled. Once cool, the clay is hammered away to reveal the metal image (NCERT, pp. 141–142).

Who are bhomias and bhopas in Rajasthan’s phad tradition?

Bhomias are the deified cattle-heroes of Rajasthan’s pastoral communities — brave men who died protecting the community’s cattle from robbers and are remembered as martyrs; examples include Gogaji, Jejaji, Dev Narayan, Ramdevji and Pabhuji.

Bhopas are the itinerant bards who carry the phad and perform it: they travel the territory, hold a lamp against the scroll to light the images they narrate, and sing devotional songs in night-long performances (NCERT, pp. 139–140).

What is the kohbar ghar in Mithila painting?

The kohbar ghar is the inner room of a Mithila house where the most extraordinary painting is done. On freshly plastered walls, artists paint the kohbar — a lotus with a stalk in full bloom, carrying metaphoric and tantric connotations — surrounded by images of gods and goddesses. It is painted for ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings (NCERT, p. 130).