Madhya Pradesh Quiz: Tribal Art and Culture (Gond Painting)

A Pardhan Gond of Patangarh village in Dindori district, he was brought to Bhopal in the early nineteen eighties for Roopankar, the gallery of Bharat Bhavan, and turned the Digna wall patterns and the songs of Bada Dev into paintings on paper and canvas.

Patangarh, the village of Jangarh Singh Shyam and of many Gond painters after him, lies in Dindori district in the eastern, forested part of the state, in the Gond country that also covers Mandla.

Pithora is the ritual wall painting of the Bhil and Bhilala people of Jhabua, Alirajpur and Dhar in the west of the state.

Bharat Bhavan opened at Bhopal in 1982 in a building designed by the architect Charles Correa, and its art gallery Roopankar, shaped by the painter Jagdish Swaminathan, placed the work of village and tribal artists beside modern Indian painting.

Bhuri Bai of Pitol village in Jhabua district is a Bhil artist who began as a wage worker at the Bharat Bhavan site, was encouraged to paint on paper by Jagdish Swaminathan and became the first Bhil artist to carry Pithora forms on to paper and canvas.

These three are notified as particularly vulnerable tribal groups in Madhya Pradesh, a category earlier called primitive tribal groups and defined by a pre-agricultural level of technology, very low literacy, a small and stagnant population and a forest based life.

Mandana is made by women of the Malwa and Nimar region, who coat the floor or the lower wall with red geru and then draw geometric figures, flowers, peacocks and lamps on it with white chui mitti.

Bada Dev, also called Budha Dev, is the chief deity of the Gonds and is worshipped in the saja tree; the Pardhan bards sing his deeds to the three stringed bana, and these songs are the source from which Gond painting drew its subjects.

The Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya was set up in 1977 and stands on the Shamla Hills at Bhopal, overlooking the Upper Lake.

The Pardhans are the bardic group within Gond society who sing the deeds of Bada Dev to the three stringed fiddle called the bana, and who receive a customary payment from the families they sing for.

Bhajju Shyam, a nephew of Jangarh Singh Shyam and a painter of the Jangarh Kalam, was invited to London to paint a restaurant and recorded that journey in The London Jungle Book, in which the city is drawn through Gond imagery, the underground train as an earthworm and the double…