ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Ranibati Mukya

Ranibati Mukya

I'm fifty - fifty-five maybe.

At age four I was married. When I was older I made baskets, cutgrass, and carried food out to people who worked in the fields. Around the age of 15 I was married and was not allowed to go outside. Within our house and courtyard I cooked, cleaned, and dried rice and grains. Soon I had a child--it tells her age on her citizenship card.

Two years after I arrived my husband's father died and then his mother died. They owned two bighas of land and my husband sold one of the bighas to make their funeral feast. I was around 20, 25 when my son was born. Since there was no money so we sold our rice to buy things like soap and clothes, and then we started buying tobacco which we could resell at a higher price as cigarettes.

My husband likes tobacco and liquor and he smokes marijuana with a hookah. What I earn today at our center I don't give to my husband. At home my daughter-in-law has two children, and one looks after the other while she cooks. I am free to earn. With my own money I've bought roof shingles, a pump and a latrine. Everyone in my village is happy for me.

I learned to paint in my parents house. I painted everything which came out of my head--especially the birds.