A self portrait

Dulari is roughly three years old. A cane basket in hand,she walks close to her mother,a stately woman cradling a baby boy,as she negotiates a muddy divider in a rice field.

Dulari is roughly three years old. A cane basket in hand,she walks close to her mother,a stately woman cradling a baby boy,as she negotiates a muddy divider in a rice field. Fifty-year-old Dulari Devis earliest memories of her poor fishing community in Ranti,a village three km from the Madhubani district in Bihar,are made of such things. Working as a farm labour,cleaning dishes,sweeping floors and dusting furniture.

More than three decades after she was hired as a cleaning girl in Mithila artist Karpuri Devi8217;s house in Kolkata,Dulari,a self-taught artist has come out with her graphic autobiography,Following My Paintbrush,published by Tara Books. Devi,who still stays with the family of the late Karpuri Devi,intends to take readers down a pictorial trip of her journey from being an unlettered domestic help to an artist. I had no access to education. I never went to school, she says. Even as a child,she would accompany her mother to the fields and affluent homes to do chores. However,when I was working,I would see these boys at a distance,in their colourful shirts playing and laughing. The scenes would stay in my memory like colourful pictures which I wanted to paint, she explains. Between chores,she would pick up pieces of charcoal kept aside for lighting chulhas and scribble on the floor and mud walls of her house.

Her first tryst with art was interrupted when she was married off before she was 13. I was married to this man,who I later found out to be a crook. A miscarriage later,still in her early teens she gave birth to a girl. People say the baby died after a few days. But nobody really knows what happened to the child, says Shantanu Das,an art enthusiast from the family she has been staying with. I was taunted for not being able to give birth to a boy. I was fed up and came back,she says. She was hardly 15 then. One day while sweeping the floor of Karpuri Devis house,I saw people painting in another room. I was excited and went back home and started trying to mold earth into some form. I made a bird, says Dulari. She showed her work to Mahasundari Devi,a renowned Madhubani painter in the 1970s and Karpuri Devis sister-in-law and neighbour. She took me in her fold and I would watch them teach while working, she says. She sold her first painting almost a decade latera fishing village scene to a Japanese art collector. Dulari,traces her journey in the typical Mithila school of art. Scenes from her childhoodher mother selling fish,the local bully smoking a beedi perched on a mango tree and women working in paddy fieldsfill up the pages of her book. I knew I didnt want to go back to the life I left behind,I wanted a life of dignity and the book says how you can live that life,all by yourself, she says.