A foreign buyer paid me ₹22,000 for a painting and I could not sleep that night
A visitor from Germany came to our village last month through a cooperative tie-up. She saw the fish and the peacock panel I had done for the wedding season, and she asked the price. I told her twelve thousand rupees. She did not bargain, ji. She simply took out the money and paid me twenty-two thousand because she said my work was worth more than I was asking. That very night I could not sleep properly. Not because I was happy. Because I kept thinking, for thirty-five years my mother sold the same size of painting through the local haat for eight hundred rupees, and it was good money then. I have never once named a price that came to me naturally. I always think of the market here, where the families cannot pay. So we all keep the art cheap to keep it in the hands of our own people, and the foreign buyers walk away with it for whatever they feel. I am not blaming anybody. But I have started asking myself, am I doing a disservice to my mother's art by pricing it for the ones who cannot pay and not for the ones who clearly can. I have not got an answer yet.
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This got me. Not because it's about money, but because I recognized that exact ache in the chest. Someone finally prices your work at what it's worth and the first thing you feel is grief for all the years nobody did.
I had a similar moment once, much smaller scale. A gallery took one of my pastels and sold it for triple what I'd asked, and I remember being almost annoyed about it, which made no sense. Then I realized I was angry at myself for all the times I'd undersold everything I touched, and at the whole system that made me think that was normal.
Your mother's work was never worth eight hundred rupees. That's the part that stings, isn't it. The buyer saw it in ten minutes what your village never did in thirty-five years. I hope you kept some of that money aside and don't feel guilty about it, because guilt is the last thing that work owes you.
You have said this very well, ji. That ache in the chest, yes. That is exactly it.
The German lady, she was so kind, and she told me my work has value in the world. But my first thought was not for her kindness. My first thought was for my mother, who sat on the floor of our courtyard for forty years and made such fine lines, and for all the buyers at the haat who said eight hundred is the rate, take it or leave it. And she took it, because what else was there.
You are right that we become angry at ourselves too. I was angry at myself that night. I thought, why did you quote twelve thousand only? Why not twenty? Why do we always think small about our own hand?
Your gallery story, I understand it fully. The underselling, it becomes a habit of the heart. We learn it from watching our elders accept less. We think it is humility but it is not humility, it is just a low price.
But one good thing has come from it. Now when I teach the girls in our village, I tell them first thing: know what your line is worth. Do not learn the underselling from us. It is the one lesson I do not want to pass on to the next generation.