Important Notice

Jangarh Singh Shyam first came to notice through the murals he painted on the mud walls of village houses in Patangarh. One such house bore his “vivid portraits of birds in flight and tribal deities in zestful mood.” (Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 323) A skilled musician from the Pardhan Gond community, Jangarh gave visual form to tribal... Jangarh Singh Shyam first came to notice through the murals he painted on the mud walls of village houses in Patangarh. One such house bore his “vivid portraits of birds in flight and tribal deities in zestful mood.” (Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 323) A skilled musician from the Pardhan Gond community, Jangarh gave visual form to tribal deities that had rarely, if ever, been represented before, while drawing upon the flora, fauna and avifauna of Madhya Pradesh. As Aurogeeta Das observes, “Jangarh rarely depicted trees, plants, flowers, animals or birds realistically…Instead, what evoked the real most effectively in his paintings and drawings was the character of the trees, plants and flowers and the characteristic behaviour of animals, birds, fish and insects.” (Aurogeeta Das, “The Enchanted Forest: Jangarh’s Thematic Range,” Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Enchanted Forest, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2017, p. 120)
In 1981, Jangarh moved to Bhopal following his discovery by the artist Vivek Tembe, who had been sent by J Swaminathan to survey rural Madhya Pradesh for Bharat Bhavan, the state’s newly established multidisciplinary arts centre. Invited to work on paper for the first time, Jangarh embraced a wider palette while remaining rooted in the visual language he had developed in Patangarh. Bhopal’s lakes and wooded landscape also afforded him “relatively easy access to animal, bird and insect life”, which Das suggests “must have been a source of comfort to him”, given that “there is little doubt that he was a naturalist by inclination.” (Das, p. 120) The artist later remarked, “The point of going to the city... is not to change your art but to sell it.” (Artist quoted in “The Return of the Artist,” Mark Tully, No Full Stops in India, London; New York : Penguin Books, 1992, p. 277)
Jangarh’s first solo exhibition at Dhoomimal Gallery in 1984 revealed the two recurring strands of his practice: the Gond pantheon and the biodiverse environment of his childhood. Birds remained one of Jangarh’s enduring preoccupations. “When I was a child, I used to like birds. I wanted to be with them. When birds landed on my paper, I don’t know if I... [was] surprised!” (Artist quoted in Das, p. 122) Tahenguria likewise recalled that Jangarh “reflected philosophically on forests, trees and stories” and often spoke about different kinds of birds before they found expression in his paintings. (Tahenguria quoted in Das, p. 120)
The present lot centres on the monumental image of a bull. The elongated body of the bull rises like the trunk of a tree, its bovine heads branching from either side as birds punctuate the composition. Describing Jangarh as a brilliant colourist and master of innovative patterning, Das notes that his paintings in colour developed an expansive vocabulary of motifs including “triangles, diamonds, and other polygons, almonds, teardrops, irregular beans, leaves and even on occasion, hearts and paisleys.” These motifs create what Das describes as “a mazy dance in which our eyes readily become lost.” (Das, pp. 78, 81) Jangarh himself emphasised the importance of colour, “Bright colours—the good ones—are what I like. When I work more with these, the paintings that result give me satisfaction,” adding that the brighter pigments available in Bhopal enabled him to make “better paintings” than the muted colours available in his village. (Artist quoted in Kamayani Sharma, “Cantus Firmus: Notes on Listening to Jangarh Singh Shyam,” ArteSpace, online.) In the present lot, these motifs articulate every surface of the composition, from the bull’s elongated body and branching heads to the birds that surround it, creating the richly patterned visual language that became one of Jangarh’s defining artistic signatures.
“The earth calls out, Tell me Raja, why are you leaving me? You will never find such love in the city as you have found in your village!” - JANGARH SINGH SHYAM

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