Madhubani painting is a living tradition from the Mithila region of Bihar in India and parts of Nepal. Thought to date back to the seventh century, its techniques have been passed between generations of women, keeping both the art form and its stories alive.
Snippets from Visvanathan on ‘museumising‘ entire communities:
“The idea of cognitive justice established a framework of connections. It emphasised that knowledge cannot be reduced to science and that our community needs a dialogue of knowledges, not just an interdisciplinary encounter between the sciences. It sensed that science had become a hegemonic form of knowledge which was ‘museumising’ entire communities. Science, in its innovative obsessiveness, was refusing to recognise that obsolescence was a form of violence.
“Social movements today have discerned in ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ a genocidal emphasis with respect to indigenous ways of knowing. These concepts emphasise a divide between ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’, allowing ‘advanced’ societies to erase or eliminate indigenous and traditional knowledge in the name of progress.
“…why multiple time? With modern development theory has come the tacit imposition of time as something linear and absolute; a progression of events taking place one after another in a neat chronology of past, present, and future. Within this linear perception of time, that which is tribal or traditional is forced towards obsolescence and erasure as a backward entity. A society located in multiple time, however, makes the tribal a contemporary, rather than an ancestor.
