Although ritual wall painting by women goes back hundreds of years in the historic Mithila region, painting on paper for sale only began in 1967. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the paintings and several painters, especially Ganga Devi and Sita Devi, gained great popularity in India and internationally. However, in 1977, while conducting research in the Mithila, anthropologist Raymond Owens observed that commercial dealers were offering only minimal prices for rapidly executed, mass produced paintings. As a result the quality of the paintings, the market for them, and the artists morale and desire to continue painting, were all rapidly deteriorating.Inspired by M.N. Srinivas’ call for anthropologists to be of use to villages, not just to study them, Owens encouraged the painters to take their time and produce their best possible work. He then purchased their paintings for well over the market price and brought them to the US for exhibition and sale. In addition, he established a system of returning the profits from sales to the painters, in effect, eliminating the middle man and providing the painters with a second and still larger payment for their work.

In 1980, Owens and several colleagues established the Ethnic Arts Foundation to help carry out these activities. When paintings were sold by the EAF, on Owens next trip to Madhubani, he would distribute the profits (1) to the individual painters whose work had been sold as further incentive and encouragement; (2) to the Master Craftsman’s Association of Mithila (MCAM), an artists cooperative which he helped to found; and (3) to purchase still more paintings. Owens’s travel expenses were covered by research grants, consultancies, or from his own funds. By this means, between 1977 and 2005, Owens, and then the EAF, purchased some 1,700 paintings from well over 130 different painters. Over the years the EAF has organized numerous exhibitions and sales in the US, South Africa, and Iceland, sold some 850 paintings to individuals, collectors and museums, and returned tens of thousands of dollars in rupees to the Mithila painters.