Jangarh Singh Shyam

Jangarh Singh Shyam was born in 1962 in Patangarh, a village in the Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh, to a Pardhan Gond family. The Pardhan Gonds were traditionally the bards and ritual singers of the wider Gond community, and Jangarh grew up around their oral epics and the community's practice of digna — geometric wall and floor decoration made for festivals and rites of passage — rather than any tradition of painting on paper or canvas. In the late 1970s the painter J. Swaminathan, then setting up Bharat Bhavan, a new arts centre in Bhopal, encountered Jangarh's wall paintings in Patangarh and invited him to Bhopal to work with paper, canvas, and ink. Jangarh developed a personal visual vocabulary from this encounter: animals, trees, and deities from Gond oral tradition rendered in dense fields of dots, dashes, and fine parallel lines that filled each form with pattern and texture, a technique distinctively his own rather than a direct transcription of the older wall art.

Jangarh's work was exhibited across India and abroad through the 1980s and 1990s, including at the landmark 1989 Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris, bringing Gond visual art to international attention for the first time as contemporary fine art rather than ethnographic craft. He trained family members and other Pardhan Gond artists from his own village and nearby in the style, and the movement that grew from this teaching is now referred to by his name, as Jangarh Kalam — Jangarh's style or school. He died in 2001 while on a residency in Japan. The school of painting he founded is today carried on by a large community of Gond artists, many of them his own relatives and students, and Gond painting is now among the most recognized of India's contemporary tribal art movements.