Jamuna Chitrakar
Paintings: Shoto
Pir, Krishna, Manasa
Mangal, Manasa Mangal
Artist: Jamuna Chitrakar
My name is Jamuna. I wasn’t born in Naya, rather, in Thekachak. My parents, my elder sister and I lived in a single room of a house in which a Bengali man allowed us to stay. My father had enrolled us in school, but I would always escape the classroom and never study. I couldn’t learn anything—I never let my schooling benefit me. My family and I eventually moved to Naya, and my sister and I became beggars. We were so young then! But there was no other way to live. We didn’t even have the money to buy clothes. We had to eat, and we had no skills. My mother used to leave in the morning to sell cosmetics in other villages. We saw very little of her since she worked all day and came home at night. When dinner time rolled around, we would have rice, and salty, boiled potatoes. I soon found out that other children would get more alms by singing scroll songs. Begging wasn’t enough anymore: my sister and I had to develop a skill. I became successful in my efforts to learn how to sing, and people crowded around me every time opened my mouth. My sister and I spent a few years like this, singing and earning a great deal more money than before.
Then, as I grew older, my father arranged my wedding. He did so rather expediently, taking me to my husband and never returning to see me. I had my first child, Manimala, and my new family lived in abject poverty. My husband soon left my daughter and me for another woman, but I was able to stay with my former in-laws. I often found myself and my child starving. One time, my father-in-law left me with two kilos of flour and told me to make it last for eight days. Starvation was certain at that point, and one day I woke up famished and weeping with my daughter. A couple of distant uncles of mine happened upon us, and they invited me home and prepared me a couple of bowls of rice. They suggested that it was time for me to return to Naya and escape the hell I was living in.
When Manimala was four years old, my mother-in-law came to Naya and forcibly took her away from me. After that incident, my husband came to Naya to beg my uncle to bring me back to his home. He promised to take care of me, and we returned to his village so that I could be with my daughter. Soon after we returned, I became pregnant again and had a son. Three months later, my husband brought his second wife to our home, and everything fell apart. There was no way that I could manage the expenses of having extra people in our family. His second wife had no skills, and she proved only to be a nuisance. Soon after, my husband asked me to return to Naya: he decided he would be better off with his second wife. My family was upset and heartbroken for me, but I quickly picked up the scroll painting trade and used my idle time constructively.
I used to go out to sell my scrolls, come back home to cook, look after my children, tend to my goats and chickens—and paint more when I got a little free time. Four years later, my husband came to Naya, begging for my return. I told him I would absolutely not leave my home, so he stayed with me and invited another one of his wives to join us. When she arrived, the party members told him that he must divorce one of us. He refused, and they told him to sign an agreement to the effect that he would provide spousal support for both of us. If he didn’t, either of us could divorce him. In spite of signing the agreement, he never paid either any alimony. He just left. That is why we never had a formal divorce. It is laughable, indeed, that with all the misery around us, he returned to me with yet another wife four months later. He had discarded the other woman. My husband continued like this, and in total he had eight wives. His infidelity and carelessness broke me. The time came when he never returned to me. I brought up my children the hard way. There is no dearth of tragedies in my life. On a positive note, the quality of my life has definitely improved in recent years. My sons earn a bit, but I am severely in debt and currently not working. I have to manage my financial situation very carefully, but we can eat properly now. We can have dal, bhat, and vegetable, fish, and meat on occasion.
Scroll painting has played a significant role in augmenting my income. I once created a scroll telling the story of my life, but I have since sold that work. Now, if somebody places an order for a specific theme for a scroll, I paint that. I can say from my experience that the quality of scrolls being painted now is much higher. Colors are much deeper and richer. Stories vary in length, and thus the scrolls that depict the stories vary in size as well. At present, there is a lukewarm demand for scrolls that address social issues, natural calamities such as floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Honestly, though, there is a higher demand for scrolls depicting cultural and religious themes, song/dance and Santhal tribal customs.
The Santhals in particular have provided us with a new focus for scroll work. Everybody loves to see something new, so that’s why there is great demand for Santhal-related work. I have painted many scrolls on this community; I’m hoping to paint more. People are watching Jhumur, Tusu songs and Santhal dances on television. The government itself is showing a lot of enthusiasm for them: their folk culture is becoming somewhat of a cult fascination. So, people are showing interest in them and we as scroll painters are prospering. Among my other scrolls is one that depicts a Santhal wedding. The groom is proceeding to his wedding with his groomsmen. Others are beating the drums and dancing, meandering along the riverside to the bride’s house. Everybody is dancing in happiness—it’s a joyous, vibrant scene of what life, perhaps, should be.