Sadanand Menon looks at the other side
The gushy reception for Other Masters of India: Contemporary Creations of the Adivasis, the exhibition that has been on in Paris since April this year, is not entirely new or unprecedented.
Art ‘from the margins’ has been right there in the thick of global circulation since the time creative work from the subcontinent was set up for display and sale in the Great London Expositions from 1862 onwards. Shiploads of artifacts, including textiles, rugs, ceramics and wood and metal sculpture from indigenous communities as well as from the newly set up Arts and Crafts Schools in Madras and Calcutta were displayed at these international exhibitions in London, Paris and Berlin.
Besides developing a market for these, the exposure was to also contribute significantly to the growth of modern art in the West. Traditional creations from the subcontinent, along with Japanese woodcuts, African masks and Chinoiserie went a long way in influencing European artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the innovation of styles as varied as Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism.
No doubt, many of these adivasi and folk forms were to contribute equally to the creation of the Indian modern too — from the Santhal-inspired works of Abanindranath Tagore, Benode Behari Mukherji and Ramkinker Baij of the Bengal school to the contemporary painters who quote liberally from indigenous motifs and genres.
While the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, accompanied by his photographer colleague Sunil Janah, documented a considerable amount of ‘tribal art’ of middle India in the 1940s, the rich expressionism of adivasi and folk art was to be celebrated and brought into focus by pioneers like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Mulk Raj Anand in the early decades of the nation through journals like Marg.
More From This Section
As early as the mid-1950s, Gira Sarabhai (one of the early mentors of Jyotindra Jain who has curated the present exhibition in Paris), freshly returned from apprenticing with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, chose to abandon her high-modernist training and build her first building in mud. The ‘mati-ghar’ in Hansol on the outskirts of Ahmedabad is not only an architectural masterpiece but a veritable museum of the finest surviving examples of Madhubani wall-paintings. She was the first to invite the legendary Ganga Devi of Chiri village and Sita Devi of Jitwarpur to paint their fantasy on the mud walls of the interior of what now is called ‘Bagh Madhubani’. It is another matter that over the past decade in Madhubani (Bihar) itself, the villagers and artisans have been tragically displaced due to the fury of the embankment-induced floods in the Kosi and Gandak rivers. Gira’s house and NID founder Dashrath Patel’s photographs over several decades in Madubani and Mithila remain the best documents of that unique style of art which celebrates the rites of passage and the change in seasons.
Adivasi paintings of the Warli tribe in Maharashtra, which primarily document the joys and sorrows of their daily life on the mud-plastered walls of their village houses, have been a rage in Parisian salons since the late 1970s. In fact, some of the best executioners of these paintings have been permanent residents in Paris since the early 1980s. This ‘individuation’ of a collective form has only led to the dismemberment of the artistic impulse of the community.
Even to title the present exhibition ‘The Other Masters’ does disservice to the collective spirit of these forms of expression, which spring from an energy source that is specific to a shared lifestyle and a common cosmic vision. The idea of the individual ‘genius’ is downplayed in these contexts and to overload this ‘civilised’ idea on them is, in fact, to destroy them. That the Gond artist Jangarh Shyam would fall a tragic victim to this atomisation was almost inevitable. Today, his younger brother Bajju Shyam is enjoying similar individual celebrityhood as his illustrated books for Tara Publications are all the rage in Europe. Luckily, he benefits from some empathetic handholding.
The brief moment of honour for adivasi art in India happened when, in 1982, Bharat Bhavan opened in Bhopal with a specific section in its visual arts segment that included a substantial collection from Bhil, Gond and Bastar creations. Under the curatorship of artist J Swaminathan, it was to remain a primary centre for adivasi expression for over a decade. In recent years, the Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi too, through initiatives by its secretary Sathyapal, has been host to some of the most dynamic workshops, camps and exhibitions of Indian adivasi art.
Adivasi epistemology saw no distinction between life, labour and art. In any average Gond, Bastar or Warli village everybody paints, sings and dances. There is no specially trained cadre that exclusively performs these tasks for others to consume as spectators. Today most of the tribal communities that have nurtured such holistic philosophies are dismembered and lie in shambles. The modern State has not only aggressed on their lands and their forests but also on their sense of selfhood. Whatever of their creative practices survive also poignantly illustrate their existential angst. The migrant adivasi in an urban space is newly re-constituted as an ‘artist’ who ekes out a living merely ‘decorating’ the interiors of the elite rather than ‘expressing’ her/his world view on the exteriors of the village walls. They become playthings of the demand/supply logic of global markets while, occasionally, being pulled centre-stage as ‘autonomous artists’ with dollar price-tags. This, as we saw, actually destroys their creative autonomy.
Contemporary mass tourism has also produced an informal economy of ‘fake’ producers, peddling craftily simulated stuff, surfing the fashion and boutique outlets and driving the final nail in the coffin of adivasi self-reliance. The grim reality of the ‘internal imperialism’ that the adivasi is subjected to gets neutralised and sprayed over by the flattening effects of the ‘Creative and Cultural Industries’.
In his foreword, in 1957, to the important tract by Verrier Elwin, A Philosophy for NEFA [North-Eastern Frontier Alliance], Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: “I am not at all sure which is the better way of living, the tribal or our own. In some respects I am quite certain theirs is better… There is no point in trying to make them a second-rate copy of ourselves… People should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing anything on them. We should try to encourage in every way their own traditional arts and culture.”
Alas, independent India has had little time or inclination for such niceties. Indian adivasi art might be a curiosity and draw huge crowds in Europe. In India it continues to remain as threatened a species as the adivasi herself.
Sadanand Menon is a Chennai-based writer and critic
