Cooperative settled my accounts for last month. 1,850 rupees for a painting three weeks in the making.
I am putting this here because I have no one else to say it to without sounding ungrateful.
Last month I finished a painting for the cooperative, the one that takes our work to Delhi and to the fairs. Wedding scene, peacocks on both sides, natural colour. Fine line work, my eyes are not what they were, so it was slow. Three weeks nearly, with the teaching going on in the mornings.
Account came: 1,850 rupees. Paper and the red I make from sindoor and gum and the yellow from turmeric and stone, that all paid from my side. So the real figure is lower than 1,850.
There was a time when the buyer came to the house or to the haat and money was less but it was ours and the talking was ours. Now there is the cooperative and the gallery and the website, and I am grateful, truly, because the work goes far. But somewhere in that chain the person who makes the line is the smallest one in it.
My son says I should put my own price on the paper when I send it. I am 56, I have been doing this since I was a girl of nine. And still I hesitate to write a number, because in our community the art was never sold as such, it was given for the wedding, for the puja, for the household. That thinking is inside me and I cannot remove it.
Tomorrow I have to send two more to the same place. I will send. But something in the chest is sitting heavy.
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The part that stays with me is that your red and yellow came from your own hand, and that cost is simply not on the paper. I mix my own too, and I have learned that nobody pays for the hours in the material, only for the hours at the easel, if even those. Three weeks of fine line and turmeric ground by you, and 1,850 rupees. That is not a price for the work, it is a price for the transaction. Naja. I have no clever answer. The only thing I know is that the market rarely decides what a thing is worth; it decides what it can get away with paying. That is a different thing entirely, and it always has been.
"A price for the transaction, not for the work." I will be stealing that, with respect.
But I want to push on one thing. Ground turmeric and sindoor red made by your own hand is not only unpaid labour, it is also the reason the painting will still be there in fifty years when the acrylic next to it has gone chalky and grey. Nobody on that side of the counter understands that your materials are the work. They see a colour, they do not see three days of grinding. It is not a cost they forgot to write down. It is a cost they cannot see at all, because they have never had a stone in their hand.
That is the part that would keep me awake, more than the money.
"They have never had a stone in their hand." That is the sentence I will be carrying now, ji. You have named the thing exactly.
I will tell you one small incident. The cooperative man came to my house once, and he saw the stone and the gum and the turmeric drying on the cloth, and he asked, is this your kitchen work? I said no, this is the painting. He was quiet after that. Not rude, just quiet. He had no place in his head to put it.
And you are right, it is not only the money. Sindoor red will hold. My mother's painting on our wall, forty years, the red is still red. Nobody in that Delhi room is thinking about fifty years. They are thinking about the invoice and the van.
Thank you for saying it properly. Come to Madhubani sometime, I will show you the grinding. 🙂
You have written the thing I could not arrange in my own words, ji. "Nobody pays for the hours in the material, only for the hours at the easel, if even those." That is the whole matter in one line.
And even the easel hours they do not count properly. For them a painting is one painting. For me it is three weeks of mornings, and the turmeric I grind, and the gum, and the waiting for it to dry in this humidity. That waiting also is work, but it makes no picture, so it makes no rupees.
One thing I will say, and then I will stop complaining. The cooperatives are not the enemy in this. If they vanish, the buyer in Delhi comes to my door directly and offers me 600 and a story about how the market is slow. So we sit with the middleman because without him there is no road at all. That is the sad part, that we need the very thing that takes from us.
Naja, as you say. Thank you for understanding it without me having to explain.