Jangarh Singh Shyam

Jangarh Singh Shyam was born in 1962 into a Pardhan Gond family in Patangarh, a village in what is now Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh. He left school, grazed buffaloes and sold milk in a nearby town. At sixteen he married Nankusia Bai, who later became an artist herself.

In October 1981 talent scouts from Bharat Bhavan, the new arts centre in Bhopal, found him. Its first director, the painter J. Swaminathan, persuaded him to come to Bhopal and work as an artist, and showed his first paintings at Bharat Bhavan’s opening exhibition in February 1982. Shyam joined its graphic arts department and lived with his family behind Swaminathan’s house.

He was among the first Gond artists to paint on paper and canvas. He built his forms from lines of coloured dots, which drew on Gond tattoos, and from dense cross-hatching, comb-like lines and rows of tiny ovals, with radiating contours to suggest power or movement. The way of painting that grew from his example is now called Jangarh Kalam.

In 1986 he received the Shikhar Samman, the Madhya Pradesh government’s highest award for artists. He painted the dome of Bharat Bhavan and murals for the Vidhan Bhavan, the state legislature designed by Charles Correa. In 1989 his work was in Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In 2001, during his second residency at the Mithila Museum in Tokamachi, Japan, he took his own life. His death set off hard questions in India about how tribal artists were being treated abroad.