A "Sunday Bazar" Greeting Card

There was my mother-in-law's birthday last week and I ended up making a Madhubani inspired painting of Sunday Bazar. If you don't live in India, you might not know what is a Sunday Bazar. Bazar means market and this is a roadside market that keeps traveling from one city area to another all week long. In my place it is always a Sunday Bazar, in the other end of the city it would be Wednesday Bazar or Monday Bazar.

Shopping is a necessity and a pleasure as well. That's the time when my mother-in-law connect the most and have the best time together. Sunday Bazar usually sells fresh fruits and vegetables, plastic buckets, bangles and hair clips. Even if we are lazy and don't feel like going to the Sunday Bazar, we have to because there is  no any other shop around where we could get vegetables that cheap! This is the weekly shopping and it's the most important one.

When making a Madhubani greeting card for my mother-in-law I first thought just to make a miniature one with a couple of elephants and cows but what story could they tell? I decided to make a drawing that would tell a story that would connect us in some way. The vegetable market theme was definitely the best one!

A Greeting Card for My Mother-in-Law

In this painting the background is black because Sunday Bazar usually starts at about 6 pm. In India at 7pm is pitch dark and I chose to color the background totally black for the right mood.

The blue cosmic body in the center above is the moon (and not god Ravan like some neigbours thought!).

The main action in the drawing is actually a Calcutta rickshaw puller pulling a lady in his rickshaw. In Delhi, the rickshaw pullers usually use bicycle rickshaws but I chose to depict the West Bengal style rickshaw because it's simply more exotic to me and I like the rickshaw roof which is like umbrella.

The lemon yellow is definitely a path - a main-road that the vegetable vendors place their stalls on. 

The orange wheels depict their stalls on four big wheels. Most of the stalls are actually folding tables but some vendors come in their wheeled stalls as well.

Behind we can see four men. They are the vegetable and fruit sellers talking and communicating with each other. The one on the left sells apples, the one in the middle sells potatoes and the one on the rights is selling bananas.

As Sunday Bazar is usually an extremely dirty place where pieces of fruits keep falling on the ground, in this picture we can see blue cups being thrown on the ground, under the stalls. These are the paper cups that were used by the vegetable sellers to drink tea.  Sunday Bazar is usually an extremely organized place where there is a good electricity supply, security (police) and the chay-walla (a boy that supplies tea). These are the cups that were given to the vegetable vendors by the chay-wala who keeps walking from stall to stall with a big steel kettle.

Above, you can see the tree branches hanging down. The market is indeed placed under huge trees. There are no houses and the area near the main road is where an abandoned plot is, more like a little forest.

I hope my mother-in-law enjoyed the Sunday Bazar paper version! :)