“While paintings of the contemporary Gond art movement are now internationally celebrated, its three-dimensional expressions remain surprisingly neglected. Thus this solo exhibit — the first to focus on a Gond sculptor — is long overdue. Sukhnandi’s engaging, bold and earthy sculptures will astonish and captivate many Indian art devotees.”
– John H. Bowles, art critic and author of Painted Songs & Stories: The Hybrid Flowerings of Contemporary Pardhan Gond Art

Navayana, in association with W+K Exp, presents “Dog Father, Fox Mother, Their Daughter & Other Stories” by Sukhnandi Vyam, the first ever exhibition of sculptures by a Pardhan Gond artist. The exhibition, inaugurated on 24 March will be open to public  till 17 May 2010. Read The Hindu review; the Caravan review; the Business Standard review.

Dog Father, Fox Mother, Their Daughter & other stories is the first solo exhibition by Sukhnandi Vyam, a 27-year old Pardhan Gond artist from Madhya Pradesh.

Artist, 1

Sukhnandi Vyam is unique in continuing to practice Pardhan wood sculpture at a time when many in his illustrious family have moved towards canvas. Belonging to a tradition of contemporary Pardhan Gond art inaugurated by the pioneering Jangarh Singh Shyam, Vyam moved from his village in Sonpuri to Bhopal at the age of 8 and apprenticed with his uncle Subhash Vyam, the celebrated painter and sculptor. Sukhnandi has worked in many media – clay, canvas, metal and wood – but it is his wood sculptures that have won him most acclaim. In 2002, he won the Madhya Pradesh State Government award for his sculpture depicting the elaborate Mangrohi wedding ritual. His work is featured extensively in Udayan Vajpeyi’s book on Pardhan Gond art, Jangarh Kalam.

Sukhnandi Vyam’s work gives visual expression to the bana tradition among the Pardhan Gonds of eastern Madhya Pradesh; transforming oral storytelling to formal sculpture, the work loses none of the power to stimulate the imagination that words set to music on the bana contain. At a moment when we need urgently to be reminded of the critical connection between humans and the earth, Vyam’s magical realism reminds us that these connections are not pastoral fantasies of simplicity and a ‘return to nature’ but that the human relationship to the land and its gods has long been powerful, complex and strange. Of equal importance is the assertion the work, and its lineage, represents—that the creative voice, and its expression, is held within the self.  His stories are crafted using simple tools wielded by a powerful imagination.

Sukhnandi Vyam

Sukhnandi Vyam was born in 1983 in the eastern Madhya Pradesh village of Sonpuri, and now works as a sculptor within the Bhopal-based contemporary Pardhan Gond art movement inaugurated by the pioneering artist Jangarh Singh Shyam (1960–2001). Both Sukhnandi and Jangarh belong to the Pardhan Gond tribal community, which serves as the traditional keepers of their people’s cultural heritage and lineages – remembering family genealogies, and transmitting legends, sacred myths and oral histories through songs and storytelling. Pardhan Gond bards are still patronized by the larger Gond community, yet – with customary tribal patronage dwindling over the past century – their traditional livelihood and performance narratives have been made increasingly obsolete.

The Bana Mask

Fortunately, in the early-1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–1994) – then director of Bhopal’s newly founded cultural centre Bharat Bhavan – sent talent scouts into rural Madhya Pradesh, where one of them spotted the artistic talents of Jangarh Singh Shyam in the remote village of Patangarh. Swaminathan recognised Jangarh’s genius, encouraging him to become an artist; since then many other Pardhan Gonds have followed in Jangarh’s footsteps. Thus Pardhan songs and oral traditions, which had for centuries been recited to accompany performances on the bana (a sacred fiddle), also began to be depicted on paper and canvas, as well as in prominent mural commissions – such as on the facade of Madhya Pradesh’s legislative assembly building, and the domes of Bharat Bhavan. Jangarh’s art works have traveled from Patangarh via Bhopal to Delhi, Kolkata, Japan and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and are now being exhibited in the United States. At the Bharat Bhavan itself, Swaminathan ensured that the art works by Pardhan Gonds occupied pride of place alongside the best creations of non-tribal, professional urban artists.

In 2001, Jangarh tragically committed suicide while working as an artist-in-residence at a museum in Niigata, rural Japan. By then he had already brought to Bhopal’s Professors Colony a wide array of Gond artists, among whom was the married couple Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. They in turn encouraged other Gonds from their village and urban communities to seek a livelihood as professional visual artists, and have continued to generously offer guidance and informal instruction from their modest home and workplace in Bhopal. Sukhnandi Vyam is one of Subhash’s nephews and former apprentices. As an eight-year old, Sukhnandi attended a 1991 workshop on art and craft conducted by Bhopal’s Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya. His terracotta sculptures created at that workshop were impressive. In 1997, Sukhnandi permanently settled in Bhopal and, after apprenticing as a sculptor for a few years under Subhash, charted his own path.

Sukhnandi has worked in many media – including clay, canvas, metal and wood – but it is his wood sculptures that have brought him the highest acclaim. In 2002, he won the Madhya Pradesh State Government award for an unusually elaborate wood-carved ritual mangrohi wedding totem, and his wooden sculptures were extensively featured in Udayan Vajpeyi’s authoritative book Jangarh Kalam (produced by Vanya Prakashan of the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Welfare Department). Notable in this age of industrially manufactured art, Sukhnandi has wrought his magic using the most basic of tools, under a blue tarpaulin-sheet studio outside a two-room home shared with his extended family.

Mother, Daughter, Grandma

This exhibition by Sukhnandi happens at a time when few Pardhan Gonds continue to work in wood. His teacher and mentor Subhash Vyam gave up sculpting many years ago; seeing his wife Durgabai’s career soar – from the success of her paintings on paper and canvas, and her illustrations for children’s books – Subhash also moved into painting on canvas. The problems Pardhan Gond sculptors cite are: the reluctance many visiting clients and patrons have for buying more cumbersome, heavy three-dimensional art works; the ever-increasing material cost of wood; the larger studio space required for both carving and storing their works; and the relative difficulty of transporting finished sculptures.  “We can roll canvases and take them on a train. Sculptures pose many problems,” says Sukhnandi. The resistance that sculptures inherently pose to mechanical reproduction – compared to canvases – is perhaps an equally crucial impediment.

In commissioning this exhibition, W+K Exp spurred Sukhnandi to work on new sculptures. Whereas Pardhan Gond paintings have traveled widely across the world, this is the first solo exhibit of a Pardhan Gond sculptor. Hopefully, it will provide further impetus to, and revive interest in, this resurgent mode of Gond visual expression.

S. Anand, Navayana Publishing

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At this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival, as India commemorates 60 years of being a Republic on 26 January 2010, the focus is on Dalit writing. There shall be four sessions devoted to issues related to caste and Dalit writing. Despite the Constitution being piloted by Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit and one of the architects of modern India, Dalits seem to hardly figure in sectors where there is no affirmative action. Consequently, beyond representation in jobs in the government sector (which too is begrudged to them) and in politics, they continue to be shunned in the realms of culture, literature, academia and the arts. Dalits, who constitute 17 percent of the India’s 1.2 billion population, are subjected to everyday violence and brutalities. Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in 2009: “Caste is the very negation of the human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination. It condemns individuals from birth, and their communities, to a life of exploitation, violence, social exclusion and segregation.”

Savi Savarkar's Mariamma

It is from such a context of hidden apartheid that Dalit literature emerges. The opening panel in the Dalit focus, Outcaste: The Search for Public Conscience, befittingly derives its title from Ambedkar’s anxiety over the lack of a public conscience in India when it comes to the issue of discrimination against and oppression of Dalits.

In four sessions spread over five days, Dalit writers from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Delhi and Maharashtra will share platforms with nondalits who have worked on the caste question to debate issues related to identity, literature and representation. P. Sivakami, Om Prakash Valmiki, Kancha Ilaiah, Ajay Navaria, Desraj Kali, Iqbal Udasi and Laxman Gaikwad shall be the key speakers/ performers. Christophe Jaffrelot, Nirupama Dutt, S.S. Nirupam and S. Anand shall play the role of interlocutors during these sessions.

The Dalit Focus at JLF is being coordinated by S. Anand of Navayana Publishing and Namita Gokhale, founder-director of Jaipur Literature Festival. For interviews with the writers related to the Dalit sessions and further information on the Dalit focus at JLF 2010, please contact anand@navayana.org.22 Jan 2010. 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Durbar Hall.

22 Jan 2010. 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Durbar Hall
Outcaste: The Search for Public Conscience
Om Prakash Valmiki, Kancha Ilaiah, P. Sivakami and S. Anand
In a speech in 1952, Ambedkar says: “Public conscience means conscience that becomes agitated at every wrong, no matter who is the sufferer, and it means that everybody, whether he suffers that particular wrong or not, is prepared to join him in order to get him relieved… [In India] there is South Africa everywhere in the villages and yet I have very seldom found anybody belonging to the upper castes taking up the cause of the Scheduled Castes and fighting. Why? Because there is no public conscience.” This agenda-setting panel seeks to use Ambedkar’s words as a starting point to examine the “absence of public conscience”, especially among the Hindus.

23 Jan 2010. 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Baithak.
Ab Aur Nahin: An End to Suffering
Ajay Navaria and Om Prakash Valmiki in conversation with S.S. Nirupam
Introduction by Christophe Jaffrelot
This session will have readings in Hindi by Omprakash Valmiki and Ajay Navaria, with English translations. Introduced by Christophe Jaffrelot. Moderated by S.S. Nirupam.

24 Jan 2010. 2.30pm - 3.30pm. Baithak.
The Grip of Change
P. Sivakami, Laxman Gaikwad and S. Anand on caste, patriarchy and literary liberation.
When part of a literary movement that seeks to assert the humanity of the marginalized, what does it mean to be a woman, to be a ‘criminal tribe’-to be on the peripheries of the margin? Sivakami whose first novel (The Grip of Change) offers an indictment of dalit patriarchy, and Gaikwad who lays bare the anguish of being despised by the despised (Uchalya) explore the issue. Anand, anchoring the discussion, shall speak on marginality and oppression in brahmanical writings.

25 Jan 2010. 2.30 p.m. to 3.30 p.m. Baithak.
A Million Suns: A Celebration of Punjabi Dalit Literature
Desraj Kali, Iqbal Udasi, Nirupama Dutt
This session is presented by Nirupama Dutt, who will also read from the works of Lal Singh Dil. Iqbal Udasi will sing the songs of her late father, revolutionary Punjabi poet, Sant Ram Udasi. Des Raj Kali will read from his work and discuss the provocation for his art.

For further details also visit the Jaipur Literature Festival website. For biographical sketches of the speakers at these sessions, click here.