The Tribal Art of Middle India

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In an effort to rescue as much as he could from the oblivion that is likely to overwhelm the work of the tribal artist, Dr Elwin has collected a number of specimens of tribal skill. The Tribal Art of Middle India records the cream of this collection in a series of 229 photographs and drawings.

The art of modern tribal India is not of an exceptionally high standard but its study is of deep interest in as much as it is bound up with the lives and institutions of the tribesmen. In their artistic expression one finds a record of dreams, hopes and fears, of religious beliefs and ways of living. Not only does the standard of aesthetics vary with different tribes but also the field chosen for artistic expression. For example, the Muria ornament combs and tobacco-cases, the Bison-horn Maria concentrate on magnificent head-dresses, the Bondo and the Gadaba throw all their artistic energy into the decoration of their womenfolk.

The book is a valuable record of a vanishing mode of life and will appeal to artists and designers as well as anthropologists.

Verrier Elwin (29 August 1902-22 February 1964) was a British self trained anthropologist, ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career in India as a Christian missionary. Elwin is best known for his early work with the Baigas and Gonds of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh in Central India and he married a member of one of the communities he studied there. He later also worked on the tribals of several North East Indian states especially North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and settled in Shillong, the hill capital of Meghalaya.

In time he became an authority on Indian tribal lifestyle and culture, particularly on the Gondi People. He served as the Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India upon its formation in 1945. Post-independence he took up Indian citizenship. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appointed him as an adviser on tribal affairs for north-eastern India, and later he was Anthropological Adviser to the Government of NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh).

I HAVE CALLED this book a personal record, because nearly all of it is the result of my own original research in the field; the photographs, with a few exceptions, are mine, and the drawings have been made from specimens in my own collection or from photographs. Had I raided the museums for material, the book would have been fuller and more representative, but it would have been neither new nor mine.

The area which I have rather loosely called Middle India includes, for the purpose of this book, the Central Provinces (now Madhya Pradesh) and the States to the south and east which have now become part of them, the Koraput and Ganjam Districts of Orissa and the States which have been integrated in that Province, and in a sketchy, comparative sort of way, parts of Bihar.

I have lived among Gonds, Pardhans, Agarias and Baigas in the Central Provinces since the end of 1931 and have grown to know them fairly well. I have toured widely in the eastern and southern districts of the province, and have seen something of Rewa and Sarangarh. I spent three years in Bastar from 1940 to 1942, and worked there as Census Officer and Honorary Ethno grapher. In 1943 I conducted an official inquiry into aboriginal conditions in three of what were then Orissa States-Bonai, Keonjhar and Pal Lahara and made my first acquaintance with the Juangs and Bhuiyas. My first visit to Ganjam was later in the same year when I went with my friend Mr H. V. Blackburn into the Kuttia Kond country. Since then I have spent many months every year in the mountains of Orissa. I first visited Bihar, where I was the guest of Mr W. G. Archer, in 1940, and had brief glimpses then of the Hos and Mundas, Asurs and Uraons; later, in 1943, I visited the Santal Parganas and toured with the same delightful host, my guide in art as in poetry, in the Damin-i-koh, the classic Santal country. I toured in the Korku area as long ago as 1931. I visited the Dangs States of western India, in the company of Sir Francis Wylic, in 1943.

It is obvious that, in spite of having spent ten months of the year in the field for a period of fifteen years, I have only touched the fringe of this enormous area, and that the specimens I have been able to find were largely a matter of luck. There must be countless other examples of tribal art hidden away in remote villages, which it would take a lifetime to discover. I offer this collection, however, as a sample of what one individual has been able to collect. It is not much, it is true, but I am afraid that there is not much to find. We have begun too late; the great days of the Indian tribesman are gone; all we can do now is to search in the debris for traces of inspiration and scraps of beauty.

INDIAN TRIBAL ART outside Assam is rapidly disappearing, and in this book I have tried to rescue a few examples from the oblivion that within a few years will probably overwhelm it. Even here an unsympathetic critic may wonder whether the effort was worth while. For there is no doubt that the exhibits in this gallery are meagre and inferior compared to the superb work assembled in such books as Firth's Art and Life in New Guinea or Arts of West Africa edited by Sir Michael Sadler, to say nothing of the American Indian specimens presented by Boas and others. But it must be remembered that such books as these give us the choicest work of great peoples in their prime; they are to be compared, not to this work, but to that of Ajanta and Ellora. In the main, too, this African and Pacific art is that of comparatively uninhibited and vigorous populations, still hardly touched by foreign influence. Before the critic condemns the art of modern tribal India as debased and uninspired, he should remember the economic and cultural debris amidst which these scanty flowers have bloomed. There is little to inspire art in the tumbledown, odorous, bug-infested Kond or Saora hamlet; in the ignorance, poverty and depression of the Gonds or Baigas; economic exploitation and political oppression have lain too long like a heavy cloud over village India, smothering every aspiration towards the beautiful. Moreover the peculiar circumstances of Indian life deprive the aboriginals of much of their material; much has decayed, even more is concealed. There has been a system of education which encourages the aboriginal to despise the teachings and achievements of his own tribe, that infects him with the idea that there is something socially inferior about the craftsman, that even when it does teach a craft like carpentry or drawing-weakens the ancient sense of pattern, as Sir William Rothenstein has said, 'by putting before the young the dreary outlines of chairs, jugs and candlesticks'. In Indian society even today the man who works with his hands, like the singer and the artist, is relegated to the lowest caste. The Ghasia, admirable worker in brass, is an untouchable; so is the worker in iron; so is the weaver of useful and lovely cloth. The infection of this abominable attitude has spread to the aboriginals so that even when they do make something beautiful they try to hide it.

**Contents and Sample Pages**