Man & material: The lasting genius of Jangarh Singh Shyam

“When I saw the colour on white paper, tremors went through my body.”

That’s how Jangarh Singh Shyam remembers his first time using poster colours. He shared this memory with  art and cultural historian Jyotindra Jain. The two shared a close professional relationship and after the artist’s untimely death, Jain wrote the book, Jangarh Singh Shyam: A Conjuror’s Archive. What comes through loud and clear in this and every other profile of Jangarh Singh Shyam’s life is how receptive he was to each new creative medium encountered in a very short life. From the yellow clay of his village to the rOtring pen discovered during a trip abroad, Jangarh approached each medium with curiosity, courage and the wide-open heart of a beginner.

Jangarh Singh Shyam was born in 1962 to the Adivasi community of Pardhans in Patangarh village of Madhya Pradesh. Traditionally, Pardhans are the bards of the Gond tribe, a vast indigenous community spread across several states in central India. Music is integral to the culture and Jangarh grew up playing the flute as he grazed goats in the forest around his village. Like other Gond-Pardhans, he too decorated the walls of his home with clay-relief murals.

The flute-playing attracted a girl who would later become his life partner, Nankusia, and the murals attracted the attention of a group of visiting artists from Bhopal. In the early ’80s, artist J Swaminathan was looking for artists to showcase at the newly opened Roopankar Museum of Tribal Art in Bharat Bhawan. His search brought him to Patangarh, where he spotted a beautiful mural of Lord Hanuman made with ramraj mitti, the yellow clay of the region.

Swaminathan was so impressed with Jangarh’s mural that he offered him a job in the graphics department at Bharat Bhawan. The 20-something moved with his young family to Bhopal. Here, he encountered a series of new materials and mediums, and each interaction was transformative—not just for the artist, but for Indian art itself.

Before Jangarh, there was no such thing as Gond art. The Gond people created murals for ritual or ceremonial purposes. Their mythologies were preserved in song and stories, and their deities were embodied in the trees, birds and creatures of the forest. Jangarh was the first to transmit these ideas to paper. Many followed in his wake and Gond art today enjoys great demand and international recognition. The bold use of colours, the animistic themes, the repetitive patterns and use of negative space—all the hallmarks of Gond painting first took shape on Jangarh’s canvas.

During his early days in Bharat Bhawan, Jangarh learned printmaking and this led to an exploration of patterns. He used dots and lines to fill in the outlines of his subjects. In the book The Other Masters, artist Gulam Mohammed Sheikh wrote, “Jangarh has employed dots and blobs, fish-scales, semi-circles, play of comb lines and serial- rather than cross-hatching to indicate movement of forms within a form. The repetition of pattern is neither numeric nor a flattening device, it is meant to change the form, to assume volume, to expand, turn, move in directions desired.”

Bharat Bhawan was envisioned as a space to nourish dialogues between a variety of Indian art forms, from the oral to the visual to the performing arts. Here, Jangarh created posters for national theatre productions and wall murals for the legendary architect who built the institute, Charles Correa. In 1989, he was selected to show at a landmark contemporary art exhibition in Paris, Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the Earth).

Jangarh’s star rose steadily through the ’90s. He travelled extensively and there was great demand for his art among collectors, especially in France and Japan. His daughter, born during those globe-trotting days, was named Japani and she would grow up to become an artist as well. Meanwhile, others from Jangarh’s extended family back home in Patangarh followed him to Bhopal and began to make their own careers in the burgeoning genre of ‘Gond art’.

It was during one of these trips abroad that Jangarh first came upon the rOtring pen. Developed by a German company inspired by the Bauhaus art movement, the rOtring Isograph was launched in 1976 as a technical ink pen. Its ability to create precise, yet delicate lines made the Isograph a hit with artists.

According to Jyotindra Jain, Jangarh was enthralled with this discovery and it opened him up to the possibilities of a monochromatic palette. In a talk for the Asia Society in 2019, Jain said, “[Using the rOtring] he did about 200 drawings of extraordinary refinement and conceptualisation. He made strokes to create a kind of aura and luminosity around his subjects.” Most of Jangarh’s paintings in the Sarmaya collection belong to this era of the artist’s work. They showcase the range of moods and textures he was able to create using nothing more complicated than black ink on white paper.

In 2001, during an artists’ residency in Japan, Jangarh died by suicide. In a career that spanned just two decades, he created a new genre of Indian art, represented the Adivasi identity on a global stage and inspired so many tribal artists to share their perspectives with the world. His genius—sparked by a range of materials and influences—was that rare kind that invited everyone to share in its joy and generosity.

References

Hervé Perdriolle on Jangarh Singh Shyam for Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain on YouTube

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, The World of Jangarh Singh Shyam, from the book Other Masters. Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, edited by Jyotindra Jain

Jyotindra Jain on Jangarh Singh Shyam for the Asia Society, March 2019

The Many Deaths of a Pardhān: Akhilesh on Jangarh Singh Shyam for The Beacon

Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Gond art pioneer who created his own idiom, but left the world too soon by Shampa Shah on Abir Pothi

Rotring Museum