Folk Art Traditions Across the Country

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The phrase folk art flattens something that is, in India, a set of quite separate technical traditions with different materials, different social functions and different histories. Some began as wall painting made fresh for a wedding or a harvest and washed away afterwards. Some were the work of hereditary bardic families who painted a scroll in order to perform it. Some were tourist and pilgrim souvenirs sold outside temples. What they share is that they were made outside the court and academy systems, transmitted by apprenticeship inside families and communities rather than through art schools, and largely ignored by collectors until the twentieth century. What has happened since is the more interesting story: these traditions moved off walls and onto paper, canvas, saris and export catalogues, and in doing so changed both their form and who was allowed to practise them.

Painting that began on a wall

Mithila painting, better known outside Bihar as Madhubani, is the clearest example. For generations women in the Mithila region painted the mud walls of the household, especially the kohbar ghar, the nuptial chamber, with lotuses, bamboo, fish, parrots and figures of deities, using natural pigments and bamboo twigs or fingers. The paintings were made for an occasion, not for permanence. The shift came in the late 1960s, when severe drought in Bihar pushed the government's handicrafts agencies to look for non-farm income, and an officer of the All India Handicrafts Board encouraged women in the villages around Madhubani to paint on handmade paper for sale. Within a generation the tradition acquired signatures, individual reputations, national awards and international exhibitions. It also acquired new subject matter: painters began recording caste discrimination, dowry, migration and the loss of forests alongside the older mythological repertoire.

Warli painting comes from the Warli Adivasi communities of the Sahyadri foothills in Palghar and Thane districts of Maharashtra. Its visual language is austere and instantly recognisable: white rice-paste figures reduced to two triangles and a circle, painted on a wall of cow dung and red earth, arranged around ritual subjects such as the chauk painted for a wedding and the great spiral dance of villagers around a musician. Warli art became known to the wider Indian art world in the 1970s, and the artist Jivya Soma Mashe, who was the first to paint it outside a ritual occasion and simply because he wanted to, exhibited internationally and was later honoured with a Padma Shri.

Gond painting, associated with the Pardhan Gond of central India, is a different case again because its modern form has a traceable inventor. Jangarh Singh Shyam, from Patangarh village in Madhya Pradesh, was noticed in the early 1980s and brought to Bhopal to work on the Bharat Bhavan arts centre. He translated the ritual imagery of his community into paintings built from dense fields of dots and dashes, and the style he devised, sometimes called the Jangarh Kalam, has since been taken up by dozens of artists from his extended family and village. It is one of the few instances where a whole recognised school can be dated to a single living artist's studio.

Traditions built for performance and for worship

Several so-called folk arts are not really pictures at all in the way a gallery understands the term. They are visual aids to a spoken or sung performance. The phad of Rajasthan is a long horizontal cloth painting, made by hereditary painter families associated with Shahpura and Bhilwara, depicting the deeds of folk deities such as Pabuji and Devnarayan. The bhopa, the priest-singer, unrolls the cloth at night, lights the relevant section with a lamp and sings the episode, so the painting functions as a portable temple and a narrative index simultaneously. Bengal's patuas, concentrated today in villages such as Naya in Pingla, paint vertical scrolls and sing the accompanying pater gaan, a tradition that has absorbed everything from the Ramayana to tsunamis, communal violence and public health campaigns. The Cheriyal scrolls of Telangana served caste-specific storytelling communities in much the same way.

A third family exists to be used in worship and then discarded. Mata ni Pachedi, the block-printed and hand-drawn red and black cloth of Gujarat made by families of the Vaghri community, functions as a temporary shrine wall for goddess worship. Kalamkari from Srikalahasti in Andhra Pradesh, where designs are drawn freehand with a bamboo pen and fixed with mordants and vegetable dyes, produced temple hangings; the parallel Machilipatnam tradition worked with carved wooden blocks for a market that included Persia and Europe. The floor drawings known as kolam in Tamil Nadu, rangoli in the west, alpana in Bengal and aipan in Uttarakhand are made daily or seasonally by women in rice flour or chalk and are meant to be erased by feet and weather.

The commercial turn has been genuinely double-edged, and it is worth being honest about the tension rather than pretending it resolves. Market demand has given rural artists cash income, national recognition and, in the case of women painters in Mithila, a measure of independence they did not previously have. Geographical Indication registration, granted to a number of these traditions, offers some protection against outright counterfeiting. But the same demand pushes toward standardisation, because a buyer in Delhi or Melbourne wants the version they recognise. It moves work from communal walls into individual signed commodities, which changes who gets credit. It exposes artists to middlemen who capture most of the margin, and to design theft by manufacturers who print the motifs onto mass-produced goods without payment or attribution. Museums and state emporia have partly counterbalanced this, and a small number of artists now deal directly with galleries and international buyers. Whether the tradition that survives is the same tradition, or a new urban art form wearing an old name, is a question practitioners themselves answer differently.

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