In search of the 'modern'

Traditional art lies largely ignored in the realms of "modern" and "contemporary" art, almost as if it has no place in a world from which artists have distanced themselves.

There are master craftspersons who are recognised by various government agencies and awards, but to equate an artist and place him on the same plane as a saree weaver or a block printmaker is to do great disservice.

Yet, in his lifetime, Gond tribal artist Jangarh Singh Shyam was able to rise beyond the confines of such labels as "tribal" or "folk" or even "traditional" art, to create his own genre of the Mandla painting that has its roots in the tribal region of the Narmada valley in Madhya Pradesh.

Unlike some of his peers who have experimented with more modern subjects, Shyam never experimented with the content of his art (no tall buildings, no cars or trains or planes), yet his compositions are extremely modern in their concept, in the freedom with which they cover a canvas, and in the use of colours and materials.

Shyam, of course, is no more, having taken his own life while in Japan, where he hung himself in 2001, an escape from the loneliness that shrouded his last months on assignment at the Mithila Museum in Niigata prefecture.

The museum is devoted to Indian folk art and crafts, but Shyam "" an alien, for all practical purposes in a culture that can prove exceedingly harsh on those unfamiliar with its people, language or food "" found little solace here.

Before he came to Japan, Shyam had travelled to other places around the world "" France, UK, USA among them "" and there was growing awareness about his art. Having begun painting on the mud walls of his village, he was 16 when he was discovered by artist J Swaminathan in 1981, and brought to Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal.

There, he was introduced to acrylics and canvas, and adopted them as his medium of choice, to become a specialist in brush and pen painting.

At some point, Shyam broke through the barriers that surround the folk artist in India "" and even though he was a regular at such expositions as the Surajkund Crafts Mela in Haryana, and at the Crafts Museum in Delhi, his work was considered good enough to be used to paint the murals at the Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha, for which he received probably his highest commission of Rs 7 lakh, a sum he shared with his fellow artists.

For an artist who had begun painting literally for free, and moved slowly from commanding a few hundred rupees to several thousands by the time of his death, the journey was a rapid one.

By the turn of this century, large acrylic canvases of his were commanding Rs 20,000 or more, and since the quantity of work he did was little, and most of it is with unknown collectors, there has been a sharp escalation in the prices he currently commands.

A Shyam canvas, if unearthed, can command as much as Rs 1 lakh among the collector community, and proof of his acceptance was one of his paintings appearing at a collective show at Gallerie Ganesha in the capital last year.

Fortunately, Jangarh Singh Shyam did not take his art to the grave with him. Following his death, Nankusai Shyam, his wife and the mother of his three children, became an artist as a means of survival.

Today, she is a talented artist in her own right. Having begun selling small works on paper, she, too, graduated to acrylic on canvas a short while later, and works that were sold for Rs 5,000 to begin with, now already command Rs 15,000 and more.