Bhuri Bai

Bhuri Bai comes from Pitol, a village in Jhabua district on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She belongs to the Bhil, the largest tribal community in India. Like other women of her community she first painted on the walls of the house, with colours drawn out of plants and clay, and she knew Pithora painting well. She also learned to build huts from her mother, Jhabbu Bai.

She came to Bhopal as a construction labourer at Bharat Bhavan, earning six rupees a day. There the painter J. Swaminathan saw what she could do and encouraged her to paint with acrylic on paper. She has spoken of the surprise of finding so many colours ready to use, and a brush she did not have to make. She was the first Bhil artist to paint on paper, and she began working alongside Lado Bai.

Bhil painting fills its forms with dots of many colours, and her pictures are built that way: animals, trees, gods and scenes of village life. Later work lets in aeroplanes and mobile phones.

She helped build the Bhil house at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, the Museum of Man in Bhopal, where she lives. Her work was included in Other Masters of India at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2010. She received the Shikhar Samman, the Madhya Pradesh government’s highest honour for artists, and in 2021 the Padma Shri.