ARTS AND CRAFTS IN INDIA

Chemould Gallery, Mumbai wound up its activities at the Jehangir Art Gallery Complex recently and the occasion was celebrated with an exclusive show of the famous Warli painter Jivya Soma Mashe and his son Balu. Featuring their works Amrita Gupta Singh places them in a historical context and says that the tradition and modernity should be mutually inclusive in our times.

The origin of the concepts of ‘art’, ‘folk art’, ‘craft’, ‘classical art’, ‘fine art’ and ‘decorative art’ as applied to the Indian situation owes much to the 18th and 19th century geographical discoveries and subsequent colonization. The imposition of western notions of art gave birth to such categorizations, and since then ‘fine art’ and ‘classical art’ began to be used as interchangeable terms, while the decorative, the folk or craft became synonymous. As the usage of these European terminologies which was problematic and conjectural became apparent, Indian equivalents was sought out, hence the terms ‘shastric’ (canonical) or ‘classical’, assumed a higher signification, while ‘prayoga’ (of living practice) or ’desi’ (of locality or region) became equivalent to folk. A broad categorization was developed in the terms of ‘margi’ or ‘desi’ which began to be used as re-invented equivalents of European terms.

Originally, these two terminologies were not used as ‘classical’ or ‘folk’, but as ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’, and did not have any hierarchical connotations with regards to the qualities of art; Even though the term ‘margi’ was understood as ‘urban’ in contrast to ‘desi’ which stood for the local and the regional as applied to aspects of early Indian art, they necessarily differentiated the patronage of art –urban or rural- and did not qualify the former to be superior or sophisticated as against the latter as lower or crude. In other words, all creations of visual form (Shilpa) would be sacred or profane or urban or rural but not art and craft, fine and decorative, high or low.

Further, in modern terminology, the terms ‘master’ ‘creative’, ‘art’ or ‘individual talent’ came to be used exclusively for urban artists, while the ‘anonymous’, ‘folk’ ‘craft’ and ‘ethnic collectivity’ was attributed to the peasant artist and further being labeled as a ‘producer’ and not a ‘creator’ of art. Doesn’t the urban artist produce or is not craftsmanship essential to his/her art practice? One is largely aware that the influences generated by the folk and tribal art forms, contributed distinct strains to modern art, both in the Indian and Western context, and with research by dedicated art historians and artists, the ‘folk’ artist has attained greater visibility in the urban art scenario, with urban curators and galleries promoting individual narratives from agrarian societies.

Modernity is not a fixed paradigm, it is relational and tradition and modernity are mislaid polarities, for one is always found in some measure in the other, and notions of tradition/modernity/contemporaneity need to be mutually inclusive in our times.
In this context, it would be worthwhile to trace the career of the important Warli painter, Jivya Soma Mashe who is currently exhibiting with his son, Balu, at Gallery Chemould. This gallery was amongst the first to introduce Warli paintings and Mashe’s work, in 1975, on the cultural map of Mumbai, with the late Bhaskar Kulkarni promoting this art-form. But one also notices a contradiction in the press release; Mashe has been described both as a ‘famed painter’ and a ‘craftsman’, and not too many people attended the opening of this exhibition, despite the fact that Mashe has been represented in significant galleries both in India and abroad, including the Center Pompidou in Paris, and important shows in France and Germany. But this should not be a deterrent in appreciating the works of this master artist, in understanding the metaphorical endeavors that underscores his artistic Selfhood.

Traditionally, folk art springs from the fundamentals of life and invocations towards the Nature Spirit and its regenerative functions. It is the arts of a people whose lives are tuned to the rhythm of Nature and its laws of cyclical change, with earth and harvesting, intricately woven with household and fertility rituals, locative in communitarian and ritualistic acts of the clan/tribe. In Warli art, it was the married woman who painted on the walls, known as savashini, and the conventions of painting being handed down from previous generations, while the wedding priestess animated the paintings through song and performance. In this act of collectivity, the modern assumptions of the artistic Self was dissolved with no demarcations between the ‘maker’ and the ‘user’. In this context, how did Mashe build his own individual language, given the feminine context of this tradition?

In the 1970’s the introduction of brown paper and white paint revolutionalized the collective aspects of this tradition, from the wall to individual papers. Jivya Soma Mashe was the first male painter from this tradition to chart out a trajectory that not only defined his Selfhood in an awareness of his contemporaneity vis-à-vis his history, but also brought him at par with his urban counterparts. A traumatic childhood of being separated from his family led him to find solace and a form of self-expression through painting; always distanced both on psychological and physical terms from his community (his hut-studio is atop a hill away from the centre of the village), Mashe’s visual field was derived from the farm-lands, with the actual activities providing a repository of images that animated his paper-space, with a bird’s eye view of events and people. Of course in terms of form, his figures pertain to the geometric simplification that characterizes Warli art, but compositionally and in terms of content, there are several radical departures. In conjunction with human, plant, animal and insect life are images of modernity – schools, hospitals, trains, restaurants, and policemen, coalescing his experiential reality with time as a continuous process; Myths and legends co-exist with actual events, evolving dialectical relationships with the Self and the community.

On the other hand, the paintings of Mashe’s son, Balu, do not show many departures from those of his father. Would this be a case of the next generation being over-shadowed by the former, or acclimatized to the phenomenon of the demand for Warli paintings in the market, both local and global? If Mashe proposed a new pictorial narrative and a vigorous sensibility within the parameters of his tradition, one would expect that these routes to be re-structured or resources harnessed, in the exploration of another individual sensibility.