Jangarh singh shyam biography books list

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We also welcome feedback and all articles include a bibliography see below. A contemporary Indian artist and among the first Adivasi artists to come into mainstream prominence, Jangarh Singh Shyam is known for pioneering a visual idiom rooted in the culture of the Gond indigenous community of Central India. Combining an individual imagination with new subjects, techniques and mediums, his work and success inspired the Jangarh Kalam — a style and epithet that several other members of his community, the Pardhans, adopted in their careers as artists.

Jangarh singh shyam paintings

Commonly conflated with Gond painting — a traditional practice found across various Gond Adivasi groups — the style consolidated a specific visual language for the Pardhan community, whose heritage otherwise comprised oral and musical performance. Born in the village of Patangarh in the Dindori district of eastern Madhya Pradesh, Jangarh, as he was commonly known, grew up in economic poverty and was forced to abandon formal education early.

The Pardhan community to which he belonged is a Gond Adivasi subgroup traditionally entrusted with performing folkloric stories and sacred songs with music, in return for offerings and patronage from other Gond groups. Their hereditary livelihood weakened progressively with the changes accompanying colonisation, and they took to agricultural work, remaining marginalised and economically vulnerable.

Jangarh was similarly forced into agricultural work, and was married at sixteen to Nankusia Bai, who would later become an artist of the Jangarh Kalam. Although the community did not have a specific painting tradition apart from geometric symbols and domestic clay reliefs, Jangarh was known within his community for his painterly abilities from a young age, and he would occasionally paint Hindu deities on the mud walls of huts.

In —81, when he was about nineteen, his talent was noticed by a team put together by the artist Jagdish Swaminathan , as part of a documentation and collection drive for the folk and Adivasi art wing of the Roopankar Museum at Bharat Bhavan , Bhopal. This encounter and subsequent interactions with Swaminathan paved the way for his frequent travels to Bhopal, where he participated in artist camps.

During these visits, he was exposed to a vibrant Modernist artistic milieu and introduced to new painting materials such as poster colours, acrylic paints and paper.