Tribal Art of Madhya Pradesh: Gond Painting and Pithora

Madhya Pradesh has the largest tribal population of any Indian state in absolute numbers, and its art is the clearest window into that society. The Bhil of the Jhabua belt, the Gond of Dindori and Mandla, and the Baiga, Bharia, Korku, Kol and Sahariya of the forest districts all paint, carve and tattoo, and in the last forty years one of these traditions, Gond painting, has moved from the mud wall of a village house to galleries in Delhi, Paris and Tokyo. This chapter covers the forms, the artists, the institutions at Bhopal that made the change possible, and the facts a paper asks about them.

Gond painting and the Jangarh Kalam

Gond painting grew out of Digna, the patterns with which Gond families decorate the walls and floors of a house at festivals, and out of the songs of the Pardhan Gonds, the bardic group that sings the deeds of Bada Dev to the three-stringed fiddle called the bana. The man who turned this into a painting on paper and canvas was Jangarh Singh Shyam of Patangarh village in Dindori district. He was brought to Bhopal in the early nineteen eighties by the painter Jagdish Swaminathan for Roopankar, the art gallery of Bharat Bhavan, which opened in 1982 in a building designed by Charles Correa. The style Jangarh built is called the Jangarh Kalam, and a whole school of artists followed him from the same few villages.

The marks of the style are easy to recognise. Every figure is filled with a signature pattern of dots, dashes, fine lines or scales, so that no two artists fill a form in the same way; the subjects are the tree of life, Bada Dev and Thakur Dev, the tiger, the snake, the peacock, the bullock and the village itself; and the colours, once made from geru and other coloured earths, charcoal, cow dung, leaf and flower juices, are now mostly acrylic and poster paint. Among the artists of this school are Bhajju Shyam, who received the Padma Shri in 2018 and whose illustrated book The London Jungle Book became famous, Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam, who illustrated Bhimayana, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, Ram Singh Urveti and Japani Shyam.

Pithora, Mandana, Digna and Godna

Pithora is not decoration but worship: the painting itself is the offering, and the horses carry the gods of the Bhil pantheon, with Pithora Dev at the centre. Bhuri Bai of Pitol village in Jhabua was the first Bhil artist to carry these forms on to paper and canvas, after she began as a wage worker on the Bharat Bhavan site, and she received the Padma Shri in 2021. In the Baiga country the Padma Shri of 2023 went to Jodhaiya Bai Baiga of Umaria district, who began painting in her old age and put Baiga life and Godna patterns on canvas.

Crafts, dance and the life behind the art

Besides painting, the tribal districts make bamboo baskets, mats and fish traps in Balaghat, Mandla and Dindori, terracotta horses and figures in Jhabua, wrought iron figures by the Agariya smiths, wood carving on house doors among the Gond, lacquer and tumba gourd vessels, and dolls of cloth and clay. The art is tied to a calendar of its own: the Karma dance of the Gond and Baiga is performed around a branch of the karam tree, the Saila dance is danced with sticks after the harvest, and the Bhagoria haat of the Bhils of Jhabua and Alirajpur is held in the days before Holi, when young people choose their partners at the weekly market. Bada Dev, worshipped in the saja tree, is the chief deity of the Gonds, and Gondi itself belongs to the Dravidian family of languages, unlike the Indo-Aryan speech around it.

Institutions, museums and honours

Bhopal is the centre of this work. Bharat Bhavan, opened in 1982, holds Roopankar, the gallery that first showed tribal painting as art rather than as craft. The Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, the National Museum of Mankind, was set up in 1977 and spreads over the Shamla Hills as an open air museum of tribal houses and life. The Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum, opened in 2013, displays the art, housing and ritual of the seven main tribal groups of the state in galleries built by the artists themselves. The Adivasi Lok Kala Evam Boli Vikas Akademi works on tribal art and dialects. The state honours artists with the Shikhar Samman, its highest award in the arts, and the Tulsi Samman, given for folk and tribal art; the rock shelters of Bhimbetka in Raisen district, inscribed by UNESCO in 2003, show that the habit of painting in this land is older than any of these institutions.