Sandip Roy: Is saving an art form actually transforming it?

Sandip Roy: Is saving an art form actually transforming it?

The ground rules for exploring prehistoric cave paintings are simple: “If you come across any baby goats, you cannot pick one up and take home, no matter how cute.”

My friend Milena continues sternly. “It will be a huge hassle for Gustav to drive all the way back here to return it.”

Gustav Imam, our guide to the tribal art of Hazaribag in Jharkhand, smiles.

“Also gents toilet to the left,” continues Milena. “Ladies to the right.”

Left on the hill slope means sal trees. Right is more sal trees. As we trot off in our respective directions into the forest, it occurs to me this art exploration trip was going to be rather different from a visit to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Delhi.

I had first encountered the Sohrai folk art of Jharkhand at an NGMA show in Kolkata. The artist Putli Devi had filled an entire wall with the striking images of animals and birds—a striped serpent drinking milk from the udders of a cow, a mongoose attacking a snake, cats who seemed to be dancing holding hands. The animals painted in red, black, white and yellow were ordinary creatures but rendered fantastical by her artistry.

That's when I heard that in villages near Hazaribag, the walls of the mud houses are covered with these images after harvests and before weddings. The pigments came from local soils like white kaolin clay and black manganese clay. The images were not so much painted as scratched into a layer of wet clay applied on the mud wall. The “brushes” were nothing more than broken combs. It sounded fascinating. It was one thing to see these paintings in a gallery. I wanted to see them in their natural habitat.

“This is not the best time to see them,” says Gustav apologetically when our group shows up at the Sanskriti museum of tribal art in Hazaribag late September. “The pictures are all faded after the monsoon. The best time to see them is right after Diwali.” That's when the women (and it's always women) of Adivasi tribes like Santhals, Oraons and Kurmis draw them afresh.

But there is another reason why this isn't the best time. Fewer and fewer houses have these drawings anymore. “Where do I have the time?” Tukni says while sitting with her granddaughter outside her house overlooking lush paddy fields in Bhelwara. Beautifully and intricately stitched blankets or ledra, artfully patched together from old saris, are sunning on a fence next to shirts and trousers. Her walls have geometric designs painted on them though they are somewhat faded by sun and rain. Tukni shrugs. “We have fields to work, cows to take care of. Painting walls doesn't bring in any money.”

Gustav tells the women he is trying to get funds from government training programmes. “But you have to paint the houses,” he remonstrates gently. “Otherwise what will people come to see?” Being an evangelist for this art form is in his blood. His father Bulu Imam, an environmental and cultural activist, is credited as the one who put the Sohrai and Khovar forms on the art map.

Sohrai celebrates the harvest festival with images of trees, animals and flowers. Khovar, linked to weddings, tends to feature fertility symbols and pictures of animals carrying their babies in their wombs, all scratched out in half-set white clay on black backgrounds.

Bulu has turned his home into a museum for these art forms. In his 80s now, he is still bubbling with stories. The Imams have a colourful history. Gustav's great-grandfather, Syed Hasan Imam, was a hugely successful barrister and former president of the Indian National Congress. Gustav's great-great-grandmother was a widow who married a Frenchman who rescued her from sati. Gustav's grandfather would take American tourists on tiger hunting expeditions for thousands of dollars.

Bulu himself hunted man-eaters and rogue elephants until he turned conservationist. In the 1990s he realised open mines were in the way of elephant corridors and a big Australian mining project was threatening to wreak environmental havoc in the area. When he stumbled upon the cave paintings of Isco near Hazaribag, he says Australian environmental activists told him, “Why don't you use rock art as your form of protest? We did that with aboriginal art in Australia.”

The art at Isco is breathtaking. Drawn with chalk and hematite mixed with blood and urine, it has survived for 10,000 years from the meso-chalcolithic period—geometric patterns, humanoid figures that resemble spacemen, fish and horned animals like rhinoceroses. Bulu has written books that point out how the Sohrai and Khoval figures and motifs might trace their lineage back to cave paintings like these found in this area.

Isco was declared a monument of national importance by the Archaeological Survey of India in 2023. But this recognition has come with a price, says Gustav. The zeal to make it tourist-friendly and accessible has resulted in a concrete path being laid alongside the paintings. “There were microliths in the soil all around there. Now they are buried forever under concrete,” sighs Gustav.

But a different concrete problem threatens the art forms now. More and more Adivasis are abandoning their mud houses for concrete ones. Sohrai art got a GI tag in 2020 but its own future appears uncertain as the mud houses crumble.

Artist Rudan Devi of the Kurmi tribe leads us through muddy paths, past gently lowing cows to her home in Jorakhnath. Its walls are adorned with pictures of peacocks with feathered tails, prancing deer and elephants. A poster on the wall shows her receiving the President's Medal. Underneath it says “Haath kho gaya, lekin kala jeevit hain (the hand was lost but the art survives).” After losing her right hand about 10 years ago, Rudan now draws with her left hand.

She brings out rolls of paintings she has done—a mother elephant with a baby inside her as if seen through an X-ray, a fawn suckling a doe, dancing peacocks. The art form that was once meant for walls is now being replicated on handmade paper so tourists like us can take it home. Traditionally it's done with pigments made from soil but now many of them are using commercial paints though they stick to the traditional hues. Rudan is surprised that our group is less interested in the colourful ones. “Those are good for fairs in Delhi and Jaipur,” Gustav tells her. “These people want the older kind.”

Once upon a time the art was never meant to be for sale. It was a ritual way the women decorated their mud homes, the clay adding an extra layer of protection to the walls. But there is no reason they must continue to live in mud homes whose roofs and walls leak every monsoon for the aesthetic enjoyment of art aficionados. The Imams are trying to encourage the women to paint the same forms on their concrete houses as well so that the art isn't lost with the mud houses. But it makes one wonder what it really means to “save” an art form.

This art was not meant to last more than a season or two. Now it's being replicated on paper and cloth so that it can be sold in the hope that it will provide an incentive to the artists to continue with it. But perhaps that adds its own complications. As Rudan rolls up a drawing of her signature one-eared elephant which someone in our group has bought, I am sure if I come back a few months later, she will have another one ready and it makes us wonder if we are inadvertently pushing her to make the images she knows will sell to city-slicker art collectors.

On our way out of the village we visit another artist, Malo Devi. Inside her home she has drawn a magnificent tiger with curious spiky orbs inside it. It's her signature tiger, Gustav tells us, just as Rudan has her signature elephant. As we leave the house I notice that on the wall outside, far more visible to passersby, is another tiger.

But this one is an advertisement for SEL Tiger—TMT Bars.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

Source: LiveMint
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