A four month-long exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, titled Other Masters of India: Contemporary Creations of the Adivasis, is the first major show in Europe to focus exclusively on Indian tribal art.
Over 7,000 visitors flocked to the exhibition curated by Dr Jyotindra Jain in the first two days of its opening in April this year. According to Vikas Harish, scientific counsellor to the exhibition, it has “created a stir in France where earlier Indian art was either associated with the classical arts or Bollywood kitsch. Nobody knew there was something between these two poles; a huge missing artistic space that has now been offered up.”
The exhibition is divided into three sections, charting the progression of adivasi works from artifact to art, or from community-oriented, ritualistic objects to a modern, individualistic idiom.
In the first section, photographs, film footage and postcards take the visitor on a journey that reflects how tribals have been perceived by mainstream society from colonial times to the present. The post-colonial state attempted to integrate tribals into the mainstream but, in fact, reproduced the same orientalised typologies constructed by the colonialists. Bollywood added a dimension to these perceptions by fetishising tribal women as scantily dressed sex objects, outside the traditional ‘prudish’ social structure of caste-Hindu society.
The second part of the exhibition deals with the actual objects of adivasi art from across India. Here the emphasis is on the ethnographic aspects of indigenous art that will be familiar to visitors to Jyotindra Jain’s former charge, the National Crafts Museum in Delhi.
Massive wooden bhuta sculptures from Karnataka, used in rituals related to ancestor worship, are at once magnificent and terrifying. Painted Hentakoi panels from the remote Nicobar islands feature ‘good spirits’ such as fish and animals used by menluna, or traditional doctors, to cure sickness. Objects of daily life from the Gond and Kondh communities in Chhattisgarh and Orissa, colourful outsized horse sculptures dedicated to the Tamil male diety Ayyanar, and clay panels produced by the potters of Molela in Rajasthan are among the other works on display here.
But it is the third section that is the most compelling, featuring works that move away from ritualistic artifacts to contemporary art, in which the individual artist gives voice to his or her personal experience, creating works as a means of self-expression rather than for any function they may serve in the community. These modern tribal renderings are moulded by the experiences of the artists as they negotiate the tensions between traditional living and new technologies, urban encroachment and a repressive state.
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Two artists in particular are showcased: Jivya Soma Mashe from the Warli tribe in Maharashtra and the Gond master Jangarh Singh Shyam from Madhya Pradesh. In some of Mashe’s pieces, all of which feature the white stick figures of traditional Warli art, rail tracks literally cut the canvas into two, bringing home the force of the disjunctures this modern means of transportation creates in tribal communities.
Mashe has redefined the medium of Warli art by using canvas rather than walls as is traditional to create his pieces, and replacing rice paste with white poster colour. His international success has opened up a new world of possibilities for indigenous artists like him. “Mashe and others sell immensely well,” says Harish. “We are talking about canvases going for five figures in US dollars.”
But Harish also points out that since much of this selling is done through art galleries, the percentage eventually finding its way to individual artists can be a fraction of what the piece actually sells for. Moreover, the work of tribal artists remains undervalued at home. Harish says that while these creations are avidly collected by European connoisseurs they are often passed over by Indian and diaspora collectors, the usual buyers of Indian contemporary art.
“I suppose there is a feeling of condescension among certain Indians towards tribals and the idea that their creations cannot have real value,” he explains.
Nonetheless, several adivasi artists have made it big on the global art scene, perhaps no one more so than the other showcased artist at the exhibition, Jangarh Singh Shyam. Jangarh’s canvases are saturated in brilliant colours, featuring magical birds and animals that leap out at the viewer with a raw energy. But, tragically, Janhgarh killed himself during an artistic residency in Japan’s Mithila Museum in Niigata in 2001. He was just 39. While the precise circumstances of his suicide remain unknown, it is likely that the pressures of the modern global art market created unbearable stresses for him, underlining the vulnerability of adivasi art celebrities who find themselves propelled into a world they are unable to negotiate.
The exhibition runs till July 18
