Gond painting, from the wall to the sheet

The painting was on a wall, and the wall was inside a house, and the house was in a village in Mandla district. It had been put there by the women of the household before a wedding, in white and ochre and a red earth, in a geometry that is counted rather than drawn. It covered the section of wall behind the place where the ceremony would happen. When the wedding was over it stayed, and in a few years the wall was replastered and the painting went under the new coat.

Nobody signed it. There was nothing to sign — the painting was a stage set for one event in the life of one house, and the person who made it was a daughter or a wife or a neighbour, working with other women, on a surface that belonged to the building. It had no title, no date, no price and no author, and it did not need any of the four.

1981

In 1981 an artist and curator named Jagdish Swaminathan, then working in Bhopal on what would become Bharat Bhavan, was travelling in Mandla district. In Patangarh village he saw the work of a young man named Jangarh Singh Shyam, who was painting on walls in a manner that was not the wedding geometry — dense, figurative, full of animals and deities and, in some versions, trains. He invited him to Bhopal.

Jangarh Singh Shyam went. He began painting on paper and canvas, at Bharat Bhavan and then independently, and within a decade his work was in national exhibitions and foreign collections. He died in 2001, aged thirty-nine, during a residency abroad, by his own hand; the circumstances have been written about since, mostly as a story about what an institution does to the person it promotes.

What concerns this pillar is not the tragedy but the transfer. Between the wall in Patangarh and the sheet in Bhopal, four things were added, and each of them changed what the painting had to be.

Four things a wall never needed

The first is an edge. A wall painting has no border because it stops where the room stops — at the door frame, at the corner, at the shelf. A painting on a sheet has to decide where it ends, and that decision is made by the size of the paper, which is made by a mill, which sells it in standard sizes. A painter who moves to paper is therefore painting to a format chosen by someone else, and the format sets how much can be said.

The second is a signature. In the village the painter was not an author; she was a woman in a household doing what the wedding required. On paper the work has to come from somebody in particular, because that is what makes it worth more than the next sheet. The name became a brand, and then a family brand: Jangarh's relatives — his wife, his sister, his brother, his son — are all painters now, and the surname is part of what a buyer is paying for.

The third is a title. A wall painting in a Gond house is not called anything; it is the painting that is there. A sheet in a gallery needs a name, because the buyer does not know the story and the label has to do the work the room used to do. The titles that resulted are mostly descriptive — a tree, a deer, the creation — which is a compression of a narrative into four words.

The fourth is a date and a price. Neither existed. Once both exist, the work becomes comparable, and comparability is what a market runs on. It also creates the possibility of a forgery, which is the clearest sign that a category has arrived: in the 2010s, as demand for "Gond art" grew, workshops outside the Gond belt began producing work in the style, and the question of who counts as a Gond painter became a commercial question rather than an ethnographic one.

What the dots did when they changed surface

The most distinctive thing about the work is that shapes are filled with pattern rather than with tone: rows of dots, chains of small dashes, hatched lines, done with great patience and no shading at all. This is a technique for covering a large area with a small tool, and on a wall that is exactly what it is for. A room is three metres by two and a half; a brush is a few millimetres wide.

On a sheet the same action means something else. The area is now small enough to fill with flat colour in an hour, so the filling stops being necessary and becomes expressive: the density of the dots becomes a way of saying that this animal is a forest animal and that one is not, or that this figure is a deity and that one is a person. The technique survived the change of surface and acquired a meaning it did not have before. That is a normal thing to happen to a craft, and it is worth noticing that it is not a loss — the dots on paper are doing more work than the dots on a wall, because now someone is looking at them.

The second market, and the second generation

Galleries are a thin market: few buyers, high prices, long gaps. In 2004 a Chennai publisher, Tara Books, began making picture books with Gond painters as illustrators, and this turned out to matter more than any exhibition. A book pays a fee, prints thousands of copies, and travels into schools and libraries; it also imposes a discipline that a gallery does not, because an illustration has to work at the size it is printed and in sequence with a text.

The generation that came through that route is now the most visible part of the practice: painters who make gallery work and children's books, who teach workshops, who are commissioned for murals in city offices. The murals are an interesting return. A wall in a corporate lobby is not the wall in Patangarh, but it is a wall, and the technique that was developed for walls works on it better than it works on paper.

The dighna has not stopped either. Women in the villages still paint the wedding geometry, still count it, still lose it under plaster. It has no market and no catalogue and it is not what anybody means when they say "Gond painting." But it is the thing the other thing came out of, and it is still being made by people who are not being paid — which is, if you follow this pillar's argument all the way, the most ordinary condition for an art form to be in.

This is entry 15 of Arts and Performance in About India. The pillar's argument — that the market does not preserve a form, it buys a version of it — is set out on the pillar page.