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@article{202450,
        author = {Amit Saxena},
        title = {Transcending Spaces: Exploration of Birud Katha of Aipan Art of Uttarakhand},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {12},
        pages = {7554-7571},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=202450},
        abstract = {The Aipan folk pictorial art is practiced and transmitted intergenerationally by the women of Kumaon, Uttarakhand. Distilled from the symbiotic relationship with the hill environment, it has a confluence of paintings, traditional songs, and embedded folk stories, that emanate ritual processes, oral expressions, and visual symbolism. Birud Katha, a folk story embedded within the Durbashtami Aipan painting is connected to the family rituals for prosperity, childbirth and welfare of children, and overall harmony within the household. When painted by the womenfolk, it unravels like an artistic performative act, with local dresses, songs, dialect, actions, cuisine, and festivity which forms cultural memories across generations, and caters to the rich palate of Indian aesthetics.
This paper, a case study integrating performance theory approaches, explores Birud Katha, by examining it for its spatial visual connotations, interconnections with the environment and the intangibility associated with its transmission viz-a-viz the domain of knowledge and practices concerning nature and universe. The study explores how Birud Katha transcends physical spaces and mediums — from the frame of a painting to the domestic dwellings, from a stage dramatization of the story to a documentation film on its intangible heritage through visual- verbal interplay and examines it as a visual archive of the living cultural practice of Uttarakhand’s ecology.},
        keywords = {Aipan art, Birud Katha, Uttarakhand’s ecology, spatial semiotics, Indian aesthetics, ritual performance, intangible cultural heritage.},
        month = {May},
        }