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Chitracharya Upendra Maharathi (1908-1981) was a painter, sculptor, illustrator, architect, and graphic and textile designer.  He was born in the village of Narendrapur in Odisha. After completing his art education at the College of Art and Craft, Calcutta, under the tutelage of Mukul Dey and Percy Brown, he settled in Bihar and made it his karmbhumi. Maharathi created a plethora of paintings that journey from the spiritualism of Buddha to the nationalism of Mahatma Gandhi and then beyond. He even lived as a recluse wandering around pilgrimage sites like Bodhgaya, Rajagriha, and Vaishali and transforming himself into an eternal seeker. A forgotten storyteller, he constantly substituted his canvas with diverse mediums like cloth, wood, clay, bronze, etc., to paint, weave or form several unforgettable tales.

In 1940, he drew up the masterful series called the “Glories of India” for the Ramgarh Congress and was entrusted with the task of designing the Ramgarh Congress Nagar Complex. The splendid and novel decoration of the gate and pandal asserted the vigour of folk art. In a sense, a new movement in folk art was initiated in this Congress session by Maharathi. The Ramgarh Congress of 1940 was his first sincere experiment with Bamboo as a craft medium. He constructed and designed the Ramgarh pandal using indigenous folk cultures in vivid form.

In the light of India’s independence movement, young Maharathi was influenced by the ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi and served India as a dynamic activist during the freedom struggle. On Gandhiji’s appeal to promote Swadeshi, he even dropped the golden prospect of an educational tour to Paris. For example, the Baavanbuti tradition of Nalanda, Bihar, comprising the woven intricate patterns and motifs on the sari, saw its downfall with the advent of sari produced by mills of Britain. Maharathi invested himself in working with the handloom weavers to revive the centuries-old tradition of the state. He established an institute in Patna, Bihar to revive the traditional crafts. The Government of Bihar renamed this institute Upendra Maharathi Shilp Anusandhan Sansthan in his honour posthumously. The Government of India acknowledged his extraordinary services of revitalizing traditional and native arts and handlooms by conferring him with the Padma Shri in 1969.