Madhushravani Festival and the Aripan Tradition: Exploring Cosmological Beliefs and Ecological Knowledge in the Storytelling Traditions of Rural Women in Mithila, Bihar, India

Abstract (English)

The northern part of Bihar is known as 'Mithila', a distinct cultural centre with a cultural and educational tradition that has extended to more than three millennia. Traditional culture still regulates people's lives and adherence to culture and tradition. The culture of Mithila is the archetype that explains and exemplifies the traditional Hindu worldview with regional cultural practices. Madhusravani is celebrated by married women, especially newly married ones in the Mithila region. They worship 'Gauri' (A Hindu Goddess), the consort of Lord Shiva (A Hindu God), for a long and happy conjugal life. 'Madhusravani starts on the third day of the 'Sawan' (monsoon season, July-August) month and lasts until fifteen days of the Maithili calendar.
This study uses an ethnographic method based on fieldwork and narrative analysis conducted in select villages of the rural Mithila region. It seeks to understand how women's ritual practices, such as drawing Aripan (ritual floor drawings made using rice paste), function as visual cosmograms and eco-symbols, mapping a sacred geography that links the household with the natural world. These ritual motifs often depict snakes, lotus flowers, ponds, and the earth's fertility, symbolising a cosmological order where humans and non-humans are interconnected through reverence, reciprocity, and ritualised care. The orality and cultural performativity in the madhushravani festival is not just a folkloric expression; It is a living epistemology through which eco-cultural worldviews such as the origin of the earth, snake behaviour, medicinal plants, seasonal changes and agricultural rhythms are encoded and passed. These rituals are repositories of cultural memory and resistance in a rapidly changing environmental and cultural landscape. They provide an indigenous framework for understanding human-nature relationships, especially in the rural Mithila region.