A Warli artist from a village in Maharashtra's Thane district who was the first to take the community's ritual wall painting, traditionally made only by married women for marriage ceremonies, onto paper and canvas as an individually authored work of art, and in doing so carried Warli painting from a single region's ritual practice to recognition across India and abroad.
महाराष्ट्र · Maharashtra, 1934–2018
Jivya Soma Mashe was born around 1934 in Dahanu taluka of Thane district, Maharashtra, into the Warli tribal community. Warli wall painting, traditionally called chauk, was made by married women of the community using rice-paste white on a mud-and-cow-dung base tinted red-brown with geranium, for weddings and other ritual occasions, and was governed by community convention rather than made or signed as an individual's own work. Mashe, encouraged in the 1970s by the social worker and craft revivalist Bhaskar Kulkarni, began painting the same visual vocabulary — human and animal figures built from simple triangles, circles, and lines, arranged around scenes of daily village and ritual life — on paper as his own individually authored compositions, a departure from both the material and the convention of the tradition he had grown up within.
His paintings drew attention first within India and then abroad, and he exhibited in France, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, becoming the artist most responsible for Warli painting's recognition as a distinct and celebrated visual tradition outside Maharashtra. He was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2011 and received the Shilp Guru award for master craftsmen from the Government of India. He taught the technique to his sons and to other artists in and around his village of Ganjad, and Warli painting today, sold on paper, canvas, cloth, and household objects across the country, traces its path from ritual wall art into a widely practised and marketed art form very largely through the path he first opened. He died in 2018.