The marriage season order where I quoted a price and my own neighbour undercut me by half
Last year in Madhubani, marriage season was coming and a family from Darbhanga came to me. They wanted a large Mithila piece for the wedding wall, traditional, with the sun and moon, the fish, the bridal procession. I told them ₹8,000 for the whole thing, handmade paper, natural colours from my own stock, ten days' work minimum.
They said they would think about it.
Next week I heard they went to a younger fellow in the next lane. He does the work too, learned from his aunt, but he charges ₹4,000. He uses poster colour, not geru and rice paste. And the paper is machine-made. But it is half my price, so they went to him.
I am not angry at the boy. He is feeding his family. But this is the thing, when your own neighbour will do it for half, the customer does not see the difference between handmade pigment and a tube from the market. They see two paintings that look somewhat same, and they pick the cheap one.
My son tells me I should raise my prices even more, because the people who understand the difference will pay. But the people who understand the difference are fewer every year. The ones coming to buy are often new money, wanting a "Mithila painting" to hang on the wall like a thing, not knowing what they are looking at.
So I am stuck. ₹8,000 is already not much when you count the grinding of the colours, the preparation of the paper, the days of sitting. But I cannot compete with ₹4,000 and poster colour. And I don't want to compete that way either.
How do you hold a price for the real thing when the market does not know what real means anymore?
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This sits with me heavily. Not because ₹4,000 is wrong for him, maybe that's what his work costs in materials and time and he's starting out, but because it pulls the whole ground out from under what this kind of work actually takes. Natural pigments, handmade paper, ten days. That's not just labour, that's knowledge. That's knowing which clay holds the colour and which rice paste won't crack.
The family probably think they got the same thing for half. They didn't. But how do you explain that to someone who's never mixed geru with their own hands?
I don't know what the answer is. Only that I've felt that quiet sting of being chosen second because someone cheaper was close enough to look the same from a distance.
You have said it exactly, ji. The family, they see two paintings, one costs this and one costs half, so they think they are smart. But they are not buying the same thing. They are buying poster colour and machine paper, and in ten years that paper will be yellow and the colour will flake off. My grandmother's work is still on the wall in our village, from 1972. Geru and rice paste, still holding.
But who is going to wait ten years to find out they were right? That is the problem.