India · Painting / Narrative Art
पैतकर चित्रकला (Paitkar Chitrakala)
Paitkar (also Jadu Patua) is the oldest known scroll painting tradition in India, practiced by the Chitrakar (painter) caste among the Santali and Ho tribal communities of Jharkhand and West Bengal border districts. The tradition has a unique social function: the Chitrakar visits bereaved households and shows a painted scroll depicting the soul of the deceased — initially painted with blank, unseeing eyes — progressing through the afterlife. The family pays the Chitrakar to complete the eyes on the final scroll panel, symbolically allowing the soul to see and proceed to the next world. Without this ritual, the soul is believed to wander. The scroll is not a decorative object — it is a functional ritual instrument, and the Chitrakar is a ritual specialist as much as an artist. The tradition is critically endangered and only partially documented.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not inscribed; proposed for nomination
A ritual art of Meena women in the Sawai Madhopur and Hadoti regions of Rajasthan.
Painted on the interior walls of houses by the Rathwa, Bhil and Bhilala communities of eastern Gujarat and western Madhya Pradesh, in thanksgiving and for wishes granted.
A portable wooden shrine with folding painted doors, made by the Jangid carpenters (suthars) of Bassi, Chittorgarh district, Rajasthan, and carried by Kavadiya Bhat storytellers of Marwar.
Meenakari is the art of applying vitreous colored enamel to gold (and sometimes silver) through a laborious multi-stage process of engraving, filling, and firing.
Hand-modeled hollow-relief votive plaques of village deities, especially Devnarayan, made by Kumhar potters of Molela, Rajsamand district, Rajasthan.
Phulkari — literally 'flower work' — is a counted thread embroidery tradition from Punjab worked predominantly on khaddar (coarse handspun cotton cloth) using silk floss in a darn stitch from the reverse of the fabric.
Bark painting is the primary visual art form of Arnhem Land Aboriginal communities — paintings in natural ochre pigments on sheets of stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta) that are stripped, flattened, heated, and prepared as a smooth…
Ochre — iron oxide mineral pigments ranging from yellow to red to purple — is the primary painting material of Aboriginal Australian visual culture, used in bark painting, body painting, rock art, and ceremony for at least 65,000 years.
The making of painted paper and silk fans in Valencia — Spain's primary fan production center, responsible for the majority of Spanish fan export since the 18th century.
The application of henna, a natural reddish-brown dye derived from powdered leaves, used by Qatari women for cosmetic body decoration for hundreds of years and directly described by The Peninsula Qatar as an art form 'steeped in ancient…
The pressing of brightly colored wool yarn into a beeswax-covered wooden board to build intricate, symbolic images derived from shamanic visions and Wixárika cosmology, developed from the 1950s–1960s as a flat-panel adaptation of the…
Sand drawing (nalot in some Vanuatu languages) is the Vanuatu tradition of drawing complex geometric figures in sand or soft earth in a single continuous line — the finger never lifting from the surface from start to finish.