Traditional artist unknown

None of the six newspapers I read every morning reported his death on May 15. As a Padma Shri awardee, he was deserving of and received a state funeral, but the art fraternity has remained largely immune to his passing. The demise, at age 84, of the great Warli artist Jivya Soma Mashe, is saddening for being unmourned by us. A few who knew (or knew of) this tongue-tied, painfully shy artist, exchanged poignant messages and wondered at the lack of tributes at his passing. A senior artist in New Delhi recalled him being brought to his house in 1976 (the year he won a national award from the government) wearing a “half pant and khaki shirt” in deference to urban sensibilities when he arrived in the city bare-bodied and barefoot, sporting no more than a langot. 

On the occasion, Mashe — as, indeed, other folk artists who were invited to the capital — was put up at a government-owned India Tourism Development Corporation hotel. The government did what it considered best, but no one thought to ask if the artist knew what to make of the mod-cons of his uprooted environment. What was he to eat? And where? How? He was not to know that you could pick up a phone and place an order for a meal that would then “magically” arrive on its own. Instead, therefore, he simply chose to remain hungry till someone took on the onus of his care. 

But it brings to mind another artist, Jangarh Singh Shyam, whose sense of alienation and, no doubt hunger, led to his suicide. Invited by the ICCR to Tokyo on a cultural exchange programme, Shyam found himself unable to cope with the estrangement caused by a language he did not understand, a cuisine he could not make sense of and an environment that appeared to him hostile. The state’s intentions might have been good, but Shyam’s suicide in an unfamiliar land was no less tragic for it. It’s certainly a reason to wonder at the disparity we impose on artists who do not fit our urban moulds. 

Jivya Soma Mashe

Over the years, I have met a number of these extraordinary artists, though mostly at Dilli Haat, or Crafts Museum, or at Shilpgrams. Here, they are reduced to anonymity amid tourists bargaining for reductions in price. To their credit, their ability to bridge the gap between the village (or the forest) and the city has resulted in hundreds of youngsters following in their footsteps, carving out careers in the practice of art. It was in these exoticised environments that I met Ganga Devi, interviewed Sita Devi, bought a work from Nainsukh (Shyam’s widow) and was introduced to Jivya Soma Mashe. 

I admire Warli art but am not its collector, or particularly drawn to it, so my meeting with Mashe — this was in Udaipur — was brief. So, why do I feel a sense of loss at his passing away? Is it because in his demise the chasm that divides the trained artist from the unschooled seems wider? Over the world, “primitive” art has inspired the greatest masters, whether it is Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh or our own Amrita Sher-Gil. India, with its rich tradition of indigenous art practice that our colonial mindset continues to degrade as “folk” or “tribal”, has the opportunity to seamlessly weave the traditional with the contemporary. Instead, the unsophisticated artist continues to be seen only at haats, underserved by both recognition and value, unrepresented by galleries. The state can only do so much. Till those of us who claim to represent the art fraternity continue to practise this apartheid, the tragedy of the Shyams and Mashes will continue to dog us.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated