A painter trained in the Madhubani or Mithila tradition, Mahasundari Devi is generally credited with introducing its idioms and visual style into the vocabulary of modern and contemporary art in India. She is also known for her sikki work, sujani embroidery, clay work, and papier-mache.

Devi was born in a Kayastha family, in the Chatra village of the Madhubani district. From the age of twelve onwards, and under the tutelage of her aunt Devisundari Devi, she would make Madhubani drawings over the mud walls of her house, as was customary for women of her community. At seventeen, she moved to the town of Ranti after her marriage to a teacher, and continued her Madhubani mural practice. It was here that she was able to explore her artistic impulses, laying the foundation for a long career.

In 1966, Bihar was hit by a severe drought that impoverished much of the state, including parts of the Mithila region, which had been chiefly sustained by its agrarian economy. In order to provide a source of non-agricultural income to the affected communities, the Handicrafts and Handloom Exports Corporation, under the activist and writer Pupul Jayakar, developed a drought-relief programme. The officer-in-charge was the Mumbai- based painter and researcher Bhaskar Kulkarni who, along with artist-designer Upendra Maharathi, encouraged the women of the region to make their paintings on handmade paper so that their art would be marketable. It was during the course of this programme that Devi’s art was brought to the attention of Kulkarni. Following an initial period of mentorship that introduced her to new mediums that would allow for artistic mobility and that familiarised her with commercial and market concerns, Devi began to travel and exhibit her work in galleries both in India and abroad. Later in her career, she founded the cooperative society Mithila Hastashilp Kalakar Audyogki Sahyog Samiti to support Madhubani practitioners.

The themes in Devi’s paintings, rendered in the convention of traditional Mithila wall painting, range from mythology, cosmology and nature to royal court scenes and everyday social events. Gods of the Hindu pantheon such as Shiva, Rama, Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati were especially important and featured in established mytho-religious tableaux such as Sita Swayamvar and Radha-Krishna Leela. Her style was simple and direct, with the colours applied in a flat, ungraded manner that emphasised the picture plane. Heavily patterned borders coupled with lines and crosses filled up most of the negative space — the complete utilisation of space being a major characteristic of the Madhubani tradition — and animated the picture plane.