Other Masters From India — Contemporary Creations of the Adivasis,' a stunning exhibition of contemporary tribal art from India opened on Monday at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
Conceived and curated by Jyotindra Jain, the former director of the Crafts Museum in New Delhi and one of India's foremost historians and chroniclers of tribal art, this exhibition is not just a visual and aesthetic treat; it has been put together diligently and intelligently, taking the viewer down the years, from the time when tribal art was ritualistic and iconographical, confined to the walls of Adivasi homes, to the present when art has enabled contemporary artists to give voice to their existential predicaments, thus transforming their artistic space.
Rare photographs
The entire credit for this exercise goes to Dr. Jain's scholarship, knowledge and aesthetic sensibility. Most of the writings and several rare photographs in the detailed and richly illustrated catalogue have been contributed by him. However, the exhibition has been marred by the fact that Dr. Jain, who spent three years working on this project, has not been given adequate credit for his contribution.
The exhibition begins by examining, with some fine old prints and photographs as well as video footage from Bombay masala films, the representation of the Adivasis over time. British colonial times, when anthropologists working on theories of race measured, recorded and photographed tribals as belonging to certain “racial” types, gave way to the calendar art of the 1950s and 1960s and the caricatural depiction of the tribal by Bollywood.
Section Two entitled ‘The People' presents Adivasi populations in a non-linear manner, each one of them being characterised by its material, ritualistic and artistic productions. Gigantic Bhuta sculptures from Karnataka, made of jackfruit wood and used in ancestor worship or appeasement have been brought all the way from the Crafts Museum in New Delhi. “Some of these pieces are about 150 years old and no museum outside India has a piece of this kind,” Dr. Jain told The Hindu in an exclusive guided tour of the exhibits.
There are objects here of incredible beauty, grace, colour and cultural and religious significance: Magical healing amulets from the Nicobar Islands, votive terracotta figures from the Ayyanar tribe in Tamil Nadu, bronze figurines from Bastar (Gond) and Orissa (Kondh), clay storytelling sculptures from Sarguja in Chhattisgarh, votive tablets from Rajasthan, paintings from the Rathwa tribe in Gujarat or the jadupatua scrolls from the Santhal tribes of Bihar or West Bengal.
Contemporary artists
But the most interesting section of the exhibition is the third one, which concentrates on contemporary artists and offers visitor a series of popular paintings with a special emphasis on two remarkable artists, Jivya Shoma Mashe of the Warli tibe in Maharashtra and Jangarh Singh Shyam, a Gond from Madhya Pradesh who tragically killed himself while working as a artist in residence in Japan in 2001.
This section is visually extremely gratifying in the most contemporary “artistic” sense, where tribal art steps out of the confines of the purely ritualistic to give voice to concerns such as urban encroachment, violence practised by the state, and the influence of modern technology. In one of the Santhal scrolls, Yama, the God of death, is shown wearing a policeman's uniform, a telling comment on how the guardians of the law are perceived by a largely disenfranchised and oppressed population. Trains, airplanes (which are part mechanical, part mythical creature) telephones, mirrors, thus mingle with harvests, fields and creatures of the forest, sometimes, as in the case of a train, completing cutting the artistic space in two.
Unfortunately, the museum has failed to fully recognise Dr. Jain's work. Despite assurances given by the museum, the erratum sheet detailing the missing credits is not an integral part of the catalogue. A belated loose leaf insertion in no way corrects the error, for once an exhibition has been dismantled, the curator has only the catalogue to show for his pains.
When questioned by this correspondent, Helene Fulgence, director of exhibitions, said that in the French system, when writers of “notes” were not identified, the work was automatically presumed to be that of the overall director of the exhibition, its curator. However, she suggested Dr. Jain could have been let down or “betrayed” by his assistant, Vikas Harish.
Mr. Harish placed the blame firmly on the Quai Branly Museum: “I am not responsible for the errors. I kept Dr. Jain fully informed. I was not in charge of the publication of the catalogue.”
As the blame game continued, with a senior museum official very rudely ticking this reporter off for “giving out the wrong message,” Ms. Fulgence confirmed that Dr. Jain had not been shown a PDF version of the catalogue for his approval. She told The Hindu that had the museum honoured its commitments to Dr. Jain, it would not have been able to bring out the catalogue in time for the “official inauguration” on Monday. The exhibition opens for the public on Tuesday.
Source: The HindiBy: Vaiju Naravane
