The art of the village women of Hazaribagh is an ancient matriarchal tradition which is coming down since thousands of years from a prehistoric tradition which evolved into house decoration sometime during the beginning of the agricultural period during the Chalcolithic (4000 B.C.) age when these village societies first began to live in mud houses among their fields. There is evidence that these traditions of paintings go back to an even earlier time when the people were living in caves. This is demonstrated by Chalcolithic mandala paintings identical to the village paintings found in the thirteen prehistoric painted rock shelters found in the hills above the villages. The earliest evidence of the art of those ancestors depict wild and domestic animals of the Mesolithic period (7000 B.C.). The intervening period between the end of the Mesolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic is the Mesochalcolithic art whose evidence is strongly felt in the painted houses of the forest tribes of Hazaribagh today and is one of the great living cultural heritages of mankind.

Since the painting of the houses during the marriage (Khovar) and the harvest seasons (Sohrai) is a sacred ritual tradition, like oral traditions of the tribal and folk preliterate societies it is handed down as a sruti matriarchal tradition from mother to daughter, and from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law. Since the marriages of the young girls take place within a radius of less than a hundred kilometers these traditions in their exchange and development create clear zones of stylistic purity, which becomes even more diverse owing to the existence of about a dozen ethnic groups following their unique and independent artistic métiers within the effulgence of a common creative genre.

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