Painting For A Living

Warli. Madhubani. Gond. Patachitra. What????

If you are in Delhi and visit the Dilli Haat Market, you’re bound to see the many stalls selling paintings of birds, peacocks, gods, goddesses, elephants, trees, moons, suns, fish and others.  Hundreds of paintings in each stall, small, big, framed or not, hung up like a school art project, stacked or strewn around waiting for someone to start picking.

It’s not a school project though. This is, in fact, a business.  Mostly a family business and even a community or village business.  The sister and the aunt paint, but they don’t speak English or the wife paints, and the husband takes care of the selling. They come from the different states and areas of India carrying with them their own or their families’ paintings to ‘show and tell’ for 15 days in the Dilli Haat Market in Delhi.

Someone inevitably speaks some English and will tell you that these are hand painted on handcrafted paper using cow dung and rice soot.

Cow dung? Isn’t that taking organic too far?

Now before you start twitching your nose with imagined unpleasant scents or beaming with delight (depends on which part of the world you come from ; if you are Lebanese like me, you might be doing the first.  A European will probably appreciate the natural touch). Anyhow, before you do any of these, you should know that this is meant as an up-sell and as I was told by more knowing persons afterwards, it is most of the time not true.

Painting with burnt rice soot and cow dung on mud plastered background is an interesting story though and if not true for most of these paintings; it is true for what was used in the original work done by the same tribes in India for which these paintings are named.

Dilli Haat is of course, not the place to go to if you want original pieces by specialized artists, but it is a good place to start for an introduction to these different tribal art types.  And it’s a great place to see how people can make a living out of art even if it is sometimes only simple drawing and colouring.

If you are already just a little bit interested, check our current collection of Madhubani and Warli paintings, still growing and dung free, and look out for future posts for more on tribal art from India.