 "a peacock;")
There is as much to be said about Jangarh Singh Shyam’s life as there is about his art. An artist from Patangarh in Madhya Pradesh, Shyam painted in the distinctive Gond style of dots and dashes. He was first spotted by artist Jagdish Swaminathan in 1981 when he was setting up the arts institution Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal. From that moment on, 20-year-old Shyam’s life took a turn that he could never have seen coming.
Detail of a mural at Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal. Photo: Jyotindra Jain / KNMA
More than 35 years down the line, a major retrospective finally features Shyam’s paintings on paper and canvas, terracotta murals, digital prints of photographs, letters, and more. The exhibition, “Jangarh Singh Shyam, A Conjuror’s Archive”, at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, explores Shyam’s extraordinary vision, which juxtaposed adivasi animistic traditions with urban elements such as aeroplanes.
Shyam’s vivid imagination was waiting for a global stage. After he painted murals for Bhopal’s Vidhan Bhavan in 1986, his work was exhibited at the controversial exhibit, Magiciens de la Terre, in Paris in 1989. Shyam’s ‘folksy’ work held its own in a famously patronising art world, asserting his adivasi culture through bold colours and bolder strokes. The deities in his paintings were those his people worshipped, gods that did not feature in the mainstream Hindu pantheon. But most of all, his work reflected his own pain of leaving his home behind, and living away from his wife in alienating, big cities.
Despite his own entry into the art pantheon, even having a school of art named after him — Jangarh Kalam in Bhopal — Shyam struggled. In a book titled Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Enchanted Forest, his long-time friend and patron, Mitchell Abdul Karim Crites, recalls the time Shyam came to Crites’ home to sell him a few paintings. “I asked why? He replied in a soft voice, ‘My buffalo has died.’ I put in front of him the drawings we liked and said show us which ones will ‘do the needful’ as they say in India. I had no idea what a buffalo cost, so Jangarh slowly counted them one by one and when he reached the total he needed, he stopped and solemnly handed them to me saying, ‘Mitch Sahib, THIS is a buffalo,’” Crites writes.
A few years later, Shyam committed suicide in 2001 while at an art residency in Japan. At the time, he was being paid Rs 12,000 a month. Less than 10 years later, the world took note of the first adivasi artist whose work was auctioned in 2010 by Sotheby’s in New York for $31,250 (Rs 2 million approximately).
‘Jangarh Singh Shyam, A Conjuror’s Archive’ will be on at KNMA, Saket, New Delhi, till January 12, 2019
‘Jangarh Singh Shyam, A Conjuror’s Archive’ will be on at KNMA, Saket, New Delhi, till January 12, 2019
A peacock treading the primeval earth. Photo: Vivek and Shalini Gupta / KNMA
A Pardhan interpretation of a crab with a trunk. Photo: Shama Zaidi / KNMA
A peacock. Photo: Courtesy Map, Bengaluru / KNMA
Serpent Shesha holding the vegetative earth on its hoods. Photo: Courtesy Map, Bengaluru / KNMA
Serpent Shesha holding the earth on its hoods. Photo: Courtesy Map, Bengaluru / KNMA
