Idital: The Wall Paintings of the Lanjia Saura

The People Who Carry It

The Saura, also written 'Saora' and sometimes called 'Savaras,' are among the oldest known Adivasi communities in India. Their presence in Odisha is documented in texts going back to the first century BCE, and their connection to the deepest mythological currents of Indian civilization is closer than most people know. It is believed that Sabari of the Ramayana belonged to the Saura tribe.

Similarly, in the Mahabharata, Krishna was stabbed by the arrow of Jara Savara, and it is believed that the body of Jara was converted into a wooden log that flowed in the sea near Puri, now worshipped as Lord Jagannath. The community that has the deepest ritual connection to Jagannath, one of Hinduism's most sacred presences, has its roots in the tribal cultures of southern Odisha.

The Saura community resides primarily in the south and south-eastern districts of Rayagada, Koraput, Ganjam, and Gajapati in Odisha, though smaller populations are also found in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Assam. The state government of Odisha recognizes 25 Saura sub-groups, though the community itself considers it to have two primary sub-groups: the hill Saura, known as Lanjia Saura, and the plain Saura, known as Sudha Saura.

It is the Lanjia Saura, the hill community, who are the keepers of the Idital tradition. They live at altitude, in villages surrounded by forest, and their relationship to the land, to the ancestors who are buried in it, and to the spirits who inhabit it, is the living context in which their art makes sense.

What Idital Is, and What It Is Not

The first thing to understand about Idital is that it is not folk decoration. It is not made to make a wall beautiful. It is made because something in the household requires it.

Saura paintings serve as a sacred medium to appease deities and ancestral spirits. These paintings are made during important life events such as childbirth, marriage, and harvest seasons. They act as a spiritual bridge to invite blessings, protection, and healing for the family.

An ittal might be painted for several reasons: to honor ancestors, to mark a festival, to ward off illness, to ease childbirth, to pray for a good harvest, or to appease forest deities. While some ittal are drawn on specific social and religious occasions, in the case of an illness, a family may approach the community shaman, who may recommend the creation of an ittal in the house along with the sacrifice of a fowl.

The process begins not with the artist but with the Kudan, the village priest or shaman. When there was suffering in the house, a Kudan was invited to find the cause. The Kudan would rub unboiled rice together in a winnowing pan, followed by some chanting, to identify the spirit. This spirit was then drawn with icons to honor it, compelling it to take away the sufferings. The painting is, in its original form, a prescription. The shaman diagnoses. Iditalmar, the painter, executes it. The wall becomes a shrine.

The process of creating an Idital is initiated by a priest or Kudan, who receives guidance through a dream from the forefathers. Before starting the painting, the artist must spend a night in the house and prepare a designated wall with red earth plaster. The Iditalmar follows stringent sacred rituals, eating one meal a day for ten to fifteen days until the painting is completed. This is not discipline for its own sake. It is the recognition that the body of the person making the painting is part of the ritual, that the painting cannot be separated from the state of the painter.

The Making: Red Wall, White Line, Bamboo Brush

The technique of Idital is deceptively simple to describe and extremely difficult to execute with the precision the tradition demands.

The wall is first cleaned and smeared with red laterite soil or red earth, creating the characteristic crimson-maroon background that distinguishes Idital paintings from almost every other tribal art form in India. Against this deep red, the white figures appear not simply as paint on a surface but as light emerging from within the wall. Idital paintings are characterized by white patterns on a crimson-maroon background.

Rice paste is prepared as the white color for painting, and a brush is made from bamboo sticks shaped to a point. No synthetic materials, no imported pigments. Every element of the painting comes from the immediate environment of the village.

The composition always begins with the border. In Saura paintings, a fishnet approach, of painting from the border inwards, is used. The outer frame is established first, creating a contained sacred space within the wall. The interior of that space is then filled with figures in parallel rows, each carrying its own population of humans, animals, and spirits.

Each painting has a rectangular frame and features icons of deities or those drawn from nature. It is said that there are 64 artistic motifs that are drawn by the Iditalmars in a painting. The figures themselves are elongated and fluid, with triangular torsos and stick limbs. They are not portraits. They are presences. While Idital serves as a medium of worship, it rarely depicts deities directly. Instead, it portrays elements of daily life, animals, plants, and human activities as metaphors for divine forces.

Every element carries deep symbolic significance. The Tree of Life represents growth, fertility, and the interconnectedness of the sky, earth, and the underworld of ancestors. Elephants and horses are symbols of strength, stability, and prosperity. The sun and moon are seen as divine witnesses to rituals, representing the eternal cycle of time. Triangles symbolize the three realms: earth, sky, and underworld. Circles denote the continuity of life and the unity of the community.

The completed artwork is then consecrated through rituals that include animal sacrifice and offerings of local brew, followed by dance and music. During harvests or festivals, the first yield of crops or fruits is ceremonially offered to the Idital before being consumed by the family.

How It Differs from Warli: The Comparison That Gets Made Too Often

Because Idital uses white figures on a dark background and because those figures are geometric, stick-like, and tribal in origin, it is almost universally compared to Warli painting from Maharashtra. The comparison is understandable. It is also misleading, and understanding why it misleads is one of the most useful things this blog can do.

Although both Warli and Saura paintings are tribal pictographs that employ stick figures, Warli art uses two equilateral triangles to depict the human body and spreads figures across a two-dimensional plane. Saura figures are more fluid, and the composition is anchored by distinctive decorative borders with figures arranged in parallel rows.

Saora paintings differ from Warli paintings in both function and composition. Except for the chawk, Warli paintings are rarely made within a demarcated outline, whereas for an easel, the first step is always to paint the outer frame. The depiction of groups of people in a concentric form, seen in Warli painting, is entirely absent in Saora painting.

Unlike Warli paintings, where male and female icons are clearly distinguishable, in Saura art there is no such physical differentiation.

But the deepest difference is not compositional. It is functional. Warli painting, in its traditional form, was made by married women of the community for wedding ceremonies, a celebration of a specific life event. Idital is made by a ritually prepared painter working under instruction from a shaman for occasions ranging from illness to childbirth to harvest to the honoring of the dead. Idital is a year-round spiritual maintenance system, a technology for keeping the relationship between the living and the dead in working order.

How It Differs from Pattachitra: The Odisha Comparison

Within Odisha, the inevitable comparison is with Pattachitra, the classical scroll painting tradition of Raghurajpur village. Both are Odishan. Both are GI-tagged. Both are painted by hand. Everything else about them is different.

Pattachitra is a court and temple art tradition made by hereditary Chitrakar families who served the Jagannath temple and whose work depicted the mythological narratives of Hindu devotional life. Its canvas is cloth prepared with tamarind paste, polished smooth. Its colors are bold, elaborate, and detailed. Its figures are expressive, richly ornamented, and identifiable as specific deities with specific iconographic attributes. Unlike Pattachitra's expressive deities, Saura figures are minimalist, with triangle torsos and stick limbs. But they are powerful, standing for universal themes like birth, death, harvest, and love.

Pattachitra belongs to the Vaishnavite tradition, to the world of temples and priests and Sanskrit learning. Idital belongs to an animistic worldview that predates Hinduism's arrival in the hills of southern Odisha, a worldview in which the ancestors are not gone but present, in which the spirits of the forest have names and preferences and must be maintained in relationship, and in which the painted wall is the meeting point between the world of the living and the world of everything else.

What Is Happening to It Now

Over time, this art has moved beyond mud walls and is now created on handmade paper, cloth, sarees, and canvas. Contemporary Saura artists have begun incorporating modern elements such as bicycles, buses, cars, and airplanes alongside traditional motifs, reflecting the tribe's adaptability.

This evolution is not simply a compromise. It is the Saura tradition doing what living traditions do, absorbing the new world into its visual vocabulary while maintaining the structural logic of the old one. An airplane in an Idital painting is not a sign of corruption. It is a sign that the Saura see the new things in their world and find a way to place them within a cosmological framework that still holds.

It appears that younger generations of Lanjia Saura are primarily drawn to this profession for financial gain rather than for the preservation of their traditions, given the significant demand for iditals. It is rare for an Idital painter to be unemployed in these villages. These artists are commissioned by state authorities to adorn city walls with their idyllic paintings.

The demand is real. The challenge is that demand from outside the community creates pressure to produce faster, on surfaces easier to transport, and in formats easier to sell. When the wall paintings are made for sale rather than for ritual, something in their logic shifts. The Iditalmar is no longer a ritual specialist following a shaman's instructions. They are an artisan responding to a buyer's preferences. The GI tag is the state's answer to this pressure. It protects the name. It establishes provenance. It cannot, on its own, protect the ritual context that gives the name its meaning.

What Folk Experience Offers Around Idital

A Saura art workshop conducted in Rayagada with Lanjia Saura artists, where participants learn to prepare the red earth base, mix rice-paste white, and work with a bamboo brush, understanding the compositional grammar of the border-inward technique

A village visit to a home in Rayagada district where traditional Idital murals still cover interior walls, with a local guide who can explain the specific occasions each painting was made for and what the figures in it mean

A documentary encounter with an Iditalmar and, where possible, with a Kudan, the shaman whose direction initiates the painting process, for those seeking to understand the tradition at its ritual roots rather than its aesthetic surface

A comparative tribal art session that places Idital alongside Pattachitra, examining the two traditions not as visual styles but as expressions of two entirely different understandings of what art is for

A commission pathway for those who want an original Idital painting, facilitated directly between buyer and artist with no intermediary taking the majority share that has become standard in the crafts trade

Folk Experience works with Lanjia Saura artists in the Rayagada district to facilitate workshops, village encounters, and direct commissions. All engagements are arranged with community consent and artist agreement on fair pricing. To inquire about our Saura painting experiences or to commission an Idital, write to us or explore the rest of this Odisha blog series.