Lalita Devi’s Parrot:
The Beginnings of the Art
The painter Lalita Devi in Simri village, Madhubani area, Jan 2012.
Rambharos took me to see Lalita Devi, an older painter who had flourished in the 80’s and whom he much admired. He remembered her as a very experimental, innovative and lively artist. Today however she was quiet and subdued. I wanted to meet her to ask about a feminist painting she did many years ago showing the many armed goddess Durga with a broom and pots and pans in her hands rather than weapons. “A man told me this was not Durga”, she said. “I told him that he keeps looking for Durga in the sky but does not see the hundreds of Durgas around him”.
As we continued to talk about her earlier work she became energized and brought out a few of her recent paintings.
Below is ‘Krishna breaking the gopi’s milk pots’, painted in soft tones using natural colors. Although Krishna teasing the milkmaids is a standard theme in Mithila painting, Lalita Devi gives it a feminist turn by making the milkmaid a much more active player than usual in the scene. Her hold on Krishna’s ankles is as much a restraining movement as a pleading one.
When we were getting ready to leave I asked if I could take a portrait of her next to a wall drawing of a parrot.
Lalita immediately said that would not do. She asked me to wait a moment, returning in a few minutes with several green leaves in her hand. She had drawn the parrot a few months earlier with leaves like these and would refresh it now. The leaves are from the Sim plant which artists used for the color green before they had store bought paints. Crushing the leaves between thumb and forefinger she began carefully but quickly to paint over the lines of the faded parrot.
She adds the finishing touch to her parrot drawn with the crushed Sim leaves.
Lalita Devi may not paint very much any more, but this act of painting was a wonderous thing to see. Rambharos and I both watched with a sense of history and a sense of participating in a timeless ritual. Mural painting is the origin of the Mithila painting we now have on paper. And here we had just witnessed the beginning of mural painting.
I had wanted a portrait of Lalita Devi. What better portrait could I have of her than this!
Peter Zirnis Jersey City, March 2012.
