Geetanjali Krishna: Death of a folk artist

In the September 2010 South Asian art auction at Sotheby’s, two of an Indian folk artist’s works went under the hammer. I was thrilled to read that my favourite folk artist Jangarh Singh Shyam’s works (Crane and Landscape with Spider) stood their ground next to the works of modern Indian masters like Husain, Souza and Raza. It’s not often that folk art gets its due recognition, and I marvelled at how far this adivasi artist from one of India’s most underdeveloped states had come. It’s a pity that he wasn’t alive to see it.

Shyam belonged to Patangarh, a remote village in Madhya Pradesh that had been adopted by noted anthropologist Verrier Elwin. He used to decorate the walls of the huts in his village with mud relief, using his paint-dipped fingertips to add colour to his works. In the early eighties, the late painter J Swaminathan saw his work and asked him to paint on paper using ordinary poster colours. It was a turning point in Shyam’s artistic life.

 

Shyam, only 17 at the time, adapted the traditional Gond style of painting into a unique amalgam of traditional and modern imagery (gods, animals as well as aeroplanes found place in his paintings). He made the transition from painting on walls to paper quite effortlessly. His brilliant use of bright colours along with dots and free-flowing lines impressed Swaminathan, who invited him to Bhopal to create murals in the Charles Correa-designed arts complex, Bharat Bhavan.

How did Shyam, who’d grown up in the forest, take to life in the city? We don’t really know. But it clearly worked wonders for his creative output, for he soon became prolific and extremely popular. His works were shown in art shows and festivals both in India and abroad, including a successful showing at the Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Most significantly, his wife and son also began painting in styles similar to his. The Madhya Pradesh government bestowed on him the highest state award, the Shikhar Samman, in 1986.

All this time, as Shyam travelled from Bhopal to Delhi, Paris and other parts of the world, there was a growing realisation that what he’d left behind was much larger than what he was going towards. Meanwhile, back in his beloved village, more artists were beginning to paint in adaptations of his style, which was coming to be recognised as the Gond style of painting. Then Shyam was invited to Japan on a three-month painting assignment with the Mithila Trust.

The events that followed are not well known. Shyam, just 37 years old then, was unhappy in Japan, but was not allowed to return until the project was completed. His passport was taken away to prevent him from leaving. But he left anyway. On July 2, 2001, Jangarh Singh Shyam was found dead in his room.

His death was termed suicide, and the exact reasons died with him. But people close to him said that though as an artist Shyam was able to communicate his tribal art quite easily to modern, international audiences, this took a toll on his mental health. The pressures and adjustments he had to make when fame forced him to live in the city eventually proved too much for him to handle.

As is often the case with brilliant people who die young, one can’t help but wonder exactly how much the world lost the day this Gond artist was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his lonely little room in Japan. But there’s one thing I’m sure of. He would have been proud to see how far the style of painting he developed has come today.