NONMETROPOLITAN

NONMETROPOLITAN

Five Contemporary Artists from IndiaPresented by E W Art - Los Angeles n Pundole Art Gallery - Mumbai n Rob Dean Art - London

September - October 2010 - Los Angeles

‘Now that the trees have spoken’ presents the work of four artists: Bhuri Bai, Ladoo Bai,Narmada Prasad Tekam and Ram Singh Urveti. Their paintings, which are being exhibitedin Mumbai for the first time, form part of a collection built up over the last five years byDadiba Pundole. They way-mark the process of dialogue that this Bombay-based galleristand collector has enjoyed with the artists, in the course of his research trips into centralIndia.

Born and raised in Madhya Pradesh, the protagonists of ‘Now that the trees have spoken’represent that emergent third field of artistic production in contemporary Indian culturewhich is neither metropolitan nor rural, neither (post)modernist nor traditional, neitherderived from academic training nor inherited without change from tribal custom. Indeed,as theorists and curators actively engaged with mapping this third field (including JSwaminathan, Jyotindra Jain, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Nancy Adajania) havedemonstrated, descriptions such as ‘tribal’ and ‘folk’, although still used as convenientshorthand, are worse than useless.

Generated from the typological obsessions of the colonial census, these labels have longbeen responsible for a dreadful incarceration. They have reduced thousands of individualsto the happenstance of birth, registering them primarily as bearers of communityidentities rather than as citizens of a Republic. And, once circumscribed as Warlis, Bhils,Gonds or Saoras, these individuals have had to mortgage their free-floating, self-renewingimaginative energies to the regime of the emporium.

None of the four artists presented in ‘Now that the trees have spoken’ inherits a primordial‘folk art’. None of them was trained in a fine arts academy. Yet their work has the capacityto surprise us, to compel our attention with its freshness of insight and rendering. In this,they provide enduring testimony to the success of a catalytic experiment in culturalevolution initiated by the painter and visionary J Swaminathan and the poet and culturaladministrator Ashok Vajpeyi. The visual sensibilities and conceptual gifts of these artistswere honed in the creative environment of Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal: a seed-ground of ideasand impulses that evolved from the partnership of Swaminathan and Vajpeyi, and a circleof colleagues they drew from various domains of creative and critical expression.

Significantly, therefore, the one artistic expression that does indeed exercise a magneticinfluence on the imagination of these artists is that of the late Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962-2001), an extraordinarily gifted artist of Gond origin and a protégé of Swaminathan. Shyamexcelled in the melding of diverse mythic and pictorial resources into an unprecedented,entirely contemporary expression that has sometimes been subsumed under the

Five Contemporary Artists from India

misleading rubric of ‘Gond painting’, but which the commentator Udayan Vajpeyi hascorrectly designated as the ‘Jangarh style’.

While achieving international recognition for his own art, Jangarh Singh Shyam alsoopened the door to acclaim for many other artists of tribal background. However, thetragic circumstances of his suicide in Japan in July 2001 only emphasised that the ‘tribalartist’ had a long way to go before he or she could throw off the shackles of theemporium-dealer-patron circuit.

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In their art, Bhuri Bai, Ladoo Bai, Tekam and Urveti invite us to reflect on an ecologymenaced by the expansion of late industrial activity. The intricately balanced textures oftheir lifeworld are subject to several debilitating and destructive factors: the vagaries ofshifting development policies; the brutalisation generated by schismatic political violence;recurrent conflicts over the natural resources of land, water, fish, birds and animals; and therivalry among religious groups and ideological activists for control over the tribalpopulation.

But delight, exuberance and an irrepressible radiance remain their chosen states of being.Although anxiety and melancholia play at the edges of their paintings and drawings, thesemoods are not permitted to overwhelm the leitmotifs of regeneration and plenitude.Startlingly, perhaps, these four artists remind us that beauty, just as much as reason, hopeor violence, can provide motive energy for processes of psychic and historicaltransformation.

These artists share a gift for conveying an aesthetic experience that is perhaps bestglossed with the Sanskrit word laya: a subliminal rhythm, a cosmic pattern of energy flow,the rippling-in and rippling-out of the universal breath. Sinuous animals and fabular birdsinhabit these frames; real and imagined aquatic and arboreal creatures address us,speaking not only from an ecosystem but also from an ecology of the mind. Bhuri Bai andRam Singh Urveti, Ladoo Bai and Narmada Prasad Tekam delight in the interplay of finesseand disturbance. They are adept at calibrating the gradations of strangeness: in theirepiphanies, trees sing in many voices, their trunks morphing into rivers in flood, swollenwith uncontainable memories; snails fly, boars fight tigers over territory; ancestral figurescross vast distances on tireless horses, and turtles carry the legends of dead islands acrossthe oceans.

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Their paintings are charged with a powerful, intuitive command over colour as carrier ofpsychic energy: understated olive greens and glowing lime yellows captivate us here, asdo alizarin and saffron fields, motifs rendered in subdued ochre and khaki, grey and blue.Each of these artists demonstrates an enviable attentiveness to surprising contrasts anddelicately tuned harmonies. The enduring influence of Jangarh Singh Shyamcommunicates itself both through the chimeras that populate these works, as well as thetravelling lines of stitch-like stipples by means of which the images are often shaped.

The protagonists of ‘Now that the trees have spoken’ display a fluency and assurance intheir absorption of motifs from diverse sources; their paintings attest to a complexmutation of narratives from their own past and from elsewhere. Song and story pass intothe pictorial image here: Tekam and Urveti’s paintings, especially, are alive with imagesdrawn from the ancestral songs of the Gonds, which have been sung, elaborated andpassed down by the Pardhans or bards of the Gond community. In Bhuri Bai and LadooBai’s paintings, especially, we may detect the luminous presence of styles from mutuallydistant parts of the Indian subcontinent. They translate, into painting, techniques culledfrom other arts: they draw on the delicate stitch-lines of kantha embroidery from easternBihar and Bengal; on the chain-stitch gestures and peacock motifs of the aari tradition, andthe distinctive mirror-work of aabhla embroidery from the Sind-Kutch border; and on sufand bandhni patterns.

In the paintings of all four artists, we also find traces of the spatial dispositions of Mithilapainting from northern Bihar, auspicious motifs from the Pithora stories of the MadhyaPradesh-Gujarat border, the geometricised figuration of Warli ritual painting. Andoccasionally, we also find references to the work of contemporary paintings by Australianartists of Aboriginal heritage.

This relay of resources arises from the Bharat Bhavan ethos, with its promotion of accessand openness to various forms and levels of art. At its peak, Bharat Bhavan hosted aninternational biennale of art and a world poetry festival, among much other stimulationsto the imagination. The collection strategies and workshop culture of its RoopankarMuseum also ensured that a broad spectrum of artistic idioms were available to the youngartists of tribal origin who were invited from remote districts, by Swaminathan’s researchteams, to discover and practise art in Bhopal.

The consequent positioning of such artists as ‘non-metropolitan contemporary artists’ hasensured the circulation of their art in a particular global circuit; this is also how they havebecome aware of the struggles and contributions of their counterparts in other countries,such as Australia, as we have already observed. The work of the four artists in ‘Now that thetrees have spoken’, and many other artists in their circle, may be regarded as the livinglegacy of the Bharat Bhavan experiment. It is the best possible tribute to the vision of JSwaminathan. n

Acknowledgements

This essay owes much to my conversations with the theorist and curator Nancy Adajania, who mobilised attentiontowards the re-definition and interpretation of the ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’ arts in a benchmark international symposium, ‘Shouldthe Crafts Survive?’, which she convened at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, April 1995.

I would also like to thank Prakash Hatvalne, Bhopal-based photographer and researcher, for his patient and detailedresponses to my questions about the lives and circumstances of the four artists in this exhibition, and about the BharatBhavan ethos.

Select Bibliography

Nancy Adajania, ‘Mother Goddess on a Bicycle and Such Other Themes’: concept note for the international symposium,‘Should the Crafts Survive?’ (Mumbai: National Centre for the Performing Arts, April 1995).

Nancy Adajania, ‘Art and Craft – Bridging the Great Divide’, in Art India Vol. 4 Issue 1 (Mumbai, January-March 1999), pp.34-38.

Nancy Adajania, ‘Past as Resource’, in Art India Vol. 6 Issue 1 (Mumbai, January-March 2001), pp. 30-37.

John Bowles, ‘Songlines from the Museum of Man’ (Tehelka, New Delhi, 28 January 2006). See:http://www.tehelka.com/story_main16.asp?filename=hub012806Songlines.asp

Verrier Elwin, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Madhav Gadgil & Ramachandra Guha, Ecological Conflicts and the Environmental Movement in India (Oxford: Blackwell,1994).

Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Situation and Symbol: A ritual identity and mode of expression under bourgeois cultural appropriation,with special reference to Warli art’, in The Indian Journal of Social Work (special issue on ‘The Social Construction andExpression of Ethnicity and Identity’, guest-ed. Nandini Rao, Vol. 57, No. 1: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay,January 1996).

Jyotindra Jain ed., Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India (New Delhi: Crafts Museum & TheHandicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation of India Ltd., 1998).

Pupul Jayakar, The Earthen Drum: An Introduction to the Ritual Arts of Rural India (New Delhi: National Museum, 1980)rpt. as The Earth Mother: Legends, Goddesses and Ritual Arts of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1989/ SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, 1990).

Geeti Sen ed., Indigenous Vision: People of India, Attitudes to the Environment (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992).

Gulammohammed Sheikh, ‘The World of Jangarh Singh Shyam’, in J Jain ed., Other Masters (1998), pp. 17-34.

J Swaminathan, ‘Pre-naturalistic Art and Postnaturalistic Vision: An Approach to the Appreciation of Tribal Art’, orig. inAshish Bose, U P Sinha, R P Tyagi eds., Demography of Tribal Development (New Delhi: B R Publishing Corporation, 1990),rpt. in Lalit Kala Contemporary No: 40/ Special Issue on J Swaminathan (New Delhi, March 1995), pp. 50-57.

J Swaminathan, ‘Submerged Archipelago’, orig. in Swaminathan ed., The Perceiving Fingers, catalogue of the RoopankarMuseum (Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan, 1987), rpt. in Lalit Kala Contemporary No: 40 (March 1995), pp. 57-59.

Udayan Vajpeyi and Vivek, Jangarh Kalam/ Narrative of a Tradition – Gond Painting (Bhopal: Vanya Prakashan/Department of Tribal Welfare, Government of Madhya Pradesh, n. d. [2006]).

bhuribaiNANKUSHIYA SHYAM

Bhuri Bai grew up in the Jhabua district on the Madhya Pradesh-Gujarat border. J Swaminathanidentified her as a potential artist nearly three decades ago, when she was a 20-year-old daily-wagelabourer. She picks up clues from the arts of embroidery as well as ritual narratives; her images shuttlebetween the intimate and the cosmic. This is especially evident in paintings where she depicts stagswhose antlers grow into forests, their bodies distinctively patterned after desert dunes or riverwavelets. She returns, often, to variations on the Tree of Life motif, playfully annotating its mythicpresence with owls that stand on stilt-legs, timid snakes, and high-spirited elephants.

Bhuri Bai demonstrates a lively and witty eye for observed detail, veining her observations withallegorical or parabolic intent. In one of her paintings, long-necked birds with elegant beaks and crestslike cockades dip into a stream to pluck fish from the shallow waters; instead, they risk being bitten byan irate crab. Her experience of the metropolis informs some of her works, in which airplanes frolic likeriver dolphins. In one of her finest works, Bhuri Bai dwells on a turtle that has just laid her eggs. She isthreatened by crocodiles that swim around her; one of them snatches an egg from her glowing yellowcache. This aquatic mandala, dominated by the conflict between female creators and male predators,speaks directly of nature while proposing an allegory of the despoliation of the hinterlands by theforces of industrial and mercantile exploitation.

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Bhuri Bai Untitled Acrylic on canvas148 x 85.5 cm.

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Bhuri Bai Untitled Acrylic on canvas122 x 151 cm.

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Bhuri Bai Untitled Acrylic on canvas118 x 153 cm.

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Bhuri Bai Untitled Acrylic on canvas147 x 84.5 cm.

ladoo bailadoo bai

Ladoo Bai, who is in her late 50s, was identified as a potential artist by J Swaminathan during hisresearch tours through the tribal districts of Madhya Pradesh. She packs her paintings densely,encrypting them with trees and animals, some of which have a symbolic significance. Among these,she fits in occasional human beings who have been scaled down in relation to nature, although theyare hunters and cultivators who could bring down the edifice of the natural with a few cataclysmicgestures. The effect of her orchestration of image-density is to communicate a bursting fullness ofregenerative power.

Ladoo Bai develops her figures as if through layers of embroidery: sometimes, she allows the trailingbranches of a tree to form a partial border around her ensemble of motifs. She revels in a dynamicasymmetry between details that are refined to completion, and details deliberately left brushy andunfinished. Many of her paintings are composed around a dance of stags and antelopes, treegoddesses and herons, snakes and hunters, turtles and riders. Certain forms that fascinate her,including the stylised standing hero, the rayed or wheel-like sun, and the dance of the animals, may betraced back to the Late Stone Age. Such images are to be found, for instance, in the Bhimbetka cavesin Central India. Their persistence in Ladoo Bai’s work may spring from a genealogical or ascribedcontinuity of ritual imagery, but may also come from the exposure of such artists to archaeologicalstudies and historical exhibitions.

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Ladoo BaiUntitledAcrylic on canvas145 x 175 cm.

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Ladoo BaiUntitledAcrylic on canvas141.5 x 170 cm.

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Ladoo BaiUntitledAcrylic on canvas142 x 174 cm.

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Ladoo BaiUntitledAcrylic on canvas142 x 173.5 cm.

nankushiyashyamNANKUSHIYA SHYAM

Blah blah

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Nankushiya ShyamUntitled Acrylic on canvas112 x 168 cm.

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Nankushiya ShyamUntitled Acrylic on canvas171 x 117 cm.

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Nankushiya ShyamUntitled Acrylic on canvas110 x 168 cm.

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Nankushiya ShyamUntitled Acrylic on canvas167 x 123 cm.

narmadaprasad tekamnarmada prasad tekam

Narmada Prasad Tekam, who is in his 30s, weaves his paintings from the interrelationships amonganimals, birds and trees. His art does not invoke an idyllic past so much as it proposes fables ofmutuality. In Tekam’s paintings, the gestures of war and the gestures of peace are difficult to tell apart.Peacocks, tigers and birds coexist, wary but accommodating. He presents deer and boars at play or inmock combat, their fur replaced by scalloped scales. Elsewhere, Tekam focuses on a dance or duelbetween a boar and a bird: incandescent against a teal field, these are not animals but actors in ashamanic drama. More amusingly, a regal serpent that has encircled a bird and is about to eat it, isdistracted from its meal by a gaggle of pesky birds.

Tekam, like many of his colleagues, is devoted to the Tree of Life: this axis mundi is by turns alive withsongbirds, heavy with houses in place of fruit, and transformed into an abacus of human heads, aSpeaking Tree from the legends. Like many of his colleagues, also, Tekam is fascinated by stags whoseantlers grow into trees, flower into forests. This image recalls to mind the Hungarian poet FerencJuhász’ celebrated poem, ‘The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamours at the Gate of Secrets’. A not whollyfortuitous association: Juhász attended the World Poetry Festival held at Bharat Bhavan in 1989, and hispoem had a profound effect on many who read and heard it.

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Narmada Prasad TekamUntitledAcrylic on canvas112 x 76 cm.

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Narmada Prasad TekamUntitledAcrylic on canvas122 x 77 cm.

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Narmada Prasad TekamUntitledAcrylic on canvas163 x 107 cm.

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Narmada Prasad TekamUntitledAcrylic on canvasxxx x xxx cm.

ramsinghurvetiRam Singh Urveti

Ram Singh Urveti, now in his 40s, divides his artistic practice between paintings and drawingsrendered in ink, both on canvas and paper. Urveti is an inspired and meticulous poet of the tree. Thetree trunk is his chosen signature: he modulates it into symbol, icon, parable, and mythic architecture.In one of his ink drawings on canvas, the bow of a stringed instrument has snagged on a tree: whatmusic will it tease from the trunk, which has already turned into the body of the instrument?Elsewhere, two figures have been tied to the base of a great tree: they serve as handles, while the treechurns the ocean of reality. Urveti also transmutes the tree trunk into a snaking trident that emergesfrom a tree-god’s head; in similar vein, the trident-trunk offers a theatrical backdrop for an assembly ofvillage deities.

Sometimes, Urveti blurs the distinction between the tree trunk and the river: in some of his drawings,he invokes the tree as a flow of village memory and everyday life; this conception is revisited in aresplendent painting dominated by a spreading red tree, encompassing human life in the agriculturalzone and animal life in the forest, and two rivers that meet in a basin, bursting with aquatic life,suggesting a man with his arms flung wide. In another hymn to the communion of red tree, blue riverand green flames of grass, Urveti produces the sense of the universe as a branching, fruiting, endlesslyself-extending energy.

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Ram Singh UrvetiUntiledAcrylic on canvas112 x 76 cm.

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Ram Singh UrvetiUntiledAcrylic on canvas125 x 68 cm.

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Ram Singh UrvetiUntiledAcrylic on canvas164 x 87 cm.

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Ram Singh UrvetiUntiledAcrylic on canvasSIZE

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