India's Indigenous Art

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Ram Sign Urveti, "Woodpecker and the Ironsmith," 2011

acrylic on canvas, 60" x 85" (photo courtesy of Sneha Ganguly)

India, like Canada, has hundreds of Indigenous communities that may lack material wealth but are rich in stories and visual creativity. And like Indigenous art in Canada – think Inuit art from the 1950s onward and West Coast art from even earlier – there’s been a push in India to have their work recognized as fine art.

A large touring exhibition, Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India, showcases more than 45 works from 24 artists at the Surrey Art Gallery in Greater Vancouver, its only stop in Canada. The show, on view until March 25, is an overdue tribute to artists from four Indigenous traditions: the Gond and Warli communities of central India, the Chitrakar narrative scroll painters of West Bengal, and the Mithila communities in Bihar, near the border with Nepal.

The Pardhans, a subgroup of the Gond tribe with close ties to Hindu culture, create fantastical images of nature, animals and gods. For instance, Ram Singh Urveti’s 2011 acrylic painting on canvas, is based on an old story about a woodpecker and an ironsmith who quarrel after getting drunk on mahua, a traditional liquor.

One of the show’s most stunning works is Tree and Panther, a 1988 piece by Jangarh Singh Shyam. Shyam’s gouache on paper uses bright blue, red, orange and green to depict forest animals. A panther sporting an oddly human face is the only creature fully facing the viewer. The other animals – a deer and several birds – are shown in profile.

Stylized and dreamlike, Shyam’s paean to nature uses a sort of pointillism, particularly in the tree in the picture’s centre. The surrounding grass features patterns in yellow, red, blue and white that look as though they were applied by the artist’s fingers. The colourful motif resembles a panther’s pawprints, linking the painting’s various elements with animistic revelry.

Shyam, who committed suicide in 2001, is considered one of the most important Gond artists. Tree and Panther was shown in a break-through exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Indian art, Magicians of the Earth, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989. An even earlier show, Unknown India: Ritual Art in Tribe and Village, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, introduced India’s Indigenous art to an American audience in 1968. It did not identify the makers of each piece as artists, instead referring to them as craftsmen or handicraft makers.

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Jamuna Devi, "Raja Salhesh with his Two Brothers and Three Flower Maidens," c. 2000

gouache on paper, 30" x 59" (photo courtesy of Sneha Ganguly)

Mithila women, as noted in the exhibition’s catalogue, painted gods on the interior walls of their homes as early as the 14th century. Manisha Jha’s The Jackfruit Tree (Tree of Life series), a 2012 acrylic and ink work on canvas, challenges the boundaries between folk art and contemporary art. It has been an ongoing struggle for Indigenous artists working within traditional practices to be recognized as contemporary artists and not ghettoized as relics from the past. Jha, who trained as an architect, uses her memories of a jackfruit tree near her childhood home as a symbol of nature’s abundance. Occupying most of the canvas, the fruit-laden tree grows out of a fishpond and supports a nest of birds.

Meanwhile, Rani Jha examines social issues in works like Abortion Clinic, 2004. In Breaking through the Curtain, 2011, she spotlights a new generation of Mithila women bravely moving out of the constraints of purdah. Even a few decades ago, Mathila women routinely covered their faces with their saris in the presence of their husbands’ male relatives or went to other rooms in the house when they visited. To venture alone outside the home was considered taboo. Trips could only be made with husbands or adult sons.

Another Mithila artist, Jamuna Devi, used gouache on paper for Raja Salhesh with his Two Brothers and Three Flower Maidens. The image, made in 2000, depicts the historic king riding an elephant in a procession.

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Jivya Soma Mashe, "Coal mining process," 2011

acrylic on paper, 38" x 38" (photo courtesy of Sneha Ganguly)

Warli art is considered to be some of India’s oldest due to its similarities to cave paintings from the Neolithic era. The Warli, based north of Mumbai, still paint on house walls plastered with cow dung using pastes made from rice flour or lime. Their paintings thus have two tones – brown (or ochre) and white. Jivya Soma Mashe, a prominent Warli artist, works with these same colors but often uses acrylic paint on paper. Mashe has moved past ritualistic paintings to depict everyday life. For instance, Coal Mining Process, 2011, draws on Mashe’s experiences working in a strip mine to help make ends meet.

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Swarna Chitrakar, "Tsunami," 2005

fabric paint on canvas, 48" x 93" (photo courtesy of Sneha Ganguly)

The Chitrakars in West Bengal near Kolkata are known for their painter-singers, who recount legends and myths through centuries-old songs and stories painted on long vertical scrolls that are unrolled one frame at a time. With the arrival of television, this tradition is starting to disappear. A 40-minute video shows the main Chitrakar community, Naya, where women are trying to make a living by painting single narrative pictures on paper that they paste onto cloth, usually old saris. They still use traditional organic pigments they make themselves.

Swarna Chitrakar’s Tsunami, 2005, is a dramatic example. This large work shows how the Chitrakar depict significant events, often in a mythologized way, by using deities, such as Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. ■

On view at the Surrey Art Gallery until March 25, 2018.