WHITEWASHED TEMPLES surround the sacred pool at the source of the Narmada. Stone steps lead down to the edge of the pool and a small, half-submerged shrine. Pilgrims make a loose line to a statue of Shiva’s mount, Nandi, to crawl under its belly. Success indicates divine favour; the Lord here seems to believe the slight shall inherit the earth. I dare not try.
A few years back the faithful would have bathed in the pool; now bathing ghats have been built outside the temple complex. The grasping Brahmins, common at so many of Hinduism’s most important shrines, are nowhere to be seen. Still true ring the words of W.H. Sleeman, the English administrator charged with suppression of the Thugee, who observed a century-and-a-half ago that bathers emerging from the Narmada ‘gave a trifle to these men … but in no case was it demanded, or even solicited with any appearance of importunity, as it commonly is at fairs and holy places on the Ganges’.
Some of this has to do with the nature of faith in this region in the heart of central India, which is encompassed by the state of Madhya Pradesh. Conspicuously absent is the multitude that defines the Indo-Gangetic plain, where 689 people crowd each square kilometre. In Madhya Pradesh, the headcount is 196, thinning out even more in the tribal regions that lie along the banks of the Narmada, where faith can be more personal, less demonstrative; it does not rely on long-lost homelands, or the distant purity of snow-clad mountains, but is rooted here and seems to extend farther back in time than the Indo-Aryan synthesis that defines the Gangetic plain.
A pilgrim slides under a statue of Nandi at the source of the Narmala
(Photo by John H. Bowles)
Fed entirely by rain, the Narmada flows through a landscape that predates by aeons the course of the Ganges, which was born of the tectonic collision that gave rise to the Himalayas. Kalidasa, the Sanskrit poet, evokes the Narmada in a metaphor so distant it startles – Reva’s streams spread dishevelled at Vindhya’s rocky foothills,/ like ashen streaks on an elephant’s flank. Reva, ‘the leaping one’, is but one of its fourteen names; for much of its course, though, the river is just Narmada, ‘the giver of delight’.
Of all the rivers of India, it is the only one to merit a parikrama – a circumambulation, the culmination of a pilgrimage. Mostly, a parikrama involves a specific destination, be it a temple shrine, a sacred mountain, a lake. The Narmada, all of it, is a parikrama, each step as holy as the rest. The parikrama can commence anywhere along its banks, but the pilgrim must keep the river to the right while walking and must never break the journey, except during the four months of the monsoon, when flooding makes travel impossible. Barefoot and dependent for food and shelter on the hospitality of those who live by the river, the pilgrim may cross to the other bank only at its source, at Amarkantak, or where the river meets the Arabian Sea at Bharuch, returning to the place the pilgrimage began – a distance of 2,700 kilometres. Today, the vast majority of pilgrims save time by making use of available bus services, but hundreds hold with tradition.
As I wander through the temple complex at Amarkantak, pilgrims are plentiful. Surprisingly many are elderly, abandoned by their children; for them the river is a vast, ever-moving, old people’s home. Then there are the likes of Chhote Lal Thakur and his companions, who have been on the Narmada parikrama for ten months. Barely twenty-seven, Thakur has been shaped by the journey – a long flowing beard untouched since the day he set out, a slender frame stripped of spare flesh. His son should now be two, he says, but he has not spoken to his family since he began the parikrama. He is surprised by my question. ‘No, no one stopped me. When Narmada Mai calls, who would do so?’
Thakur and the others ignore the older temple complex, built around another, certainly once sacred pool just a few hundred metres to the south. The Kalchuri kings, contemporaries of the Chandelas who built Khajuraoh, constructed this now-abandoned complex around the twelfth century. Some five centuries later, the Reva dynasty, its very name derived from the river, built the temples now standing at the source.
The Archaeological Survey of India fenced off the old complex after a curious pilgrim drowned in its pool’s stagnant water. The guard, Rakesh Sahu, doesn’t question the faith that takes pilgrims to the later source. Sahu says he was present when the old kund was drained and cleaned in 2005. ‘It is around thirty-five feet deep. When the water was pumped out it began to fill back at the rate of about one-and-a-half feet a day. This kund seems to be connected to the pool that devotees now believe is the source. Whenever that pool is emptied for cleaning, the level in this kund falls.’ But despite this evident kinship, no one worships at the old temples, nor visits them, except as tourists, and those stories, left untold for centuries, are now lost in time.
* * *
Reva Nayak and Nayakin, accompanied by an entourage of 360 mules and a host of Gond attendants, had wandered through the jungle for an entire day before they came to rest by the spring. It was exactly as Reva Nayak had seen in his dreams. He bathed in its waters and was cured of the itching that had long wracked his body. That night, in his first restful sleep in many years, a young girl visited his dreams – ‘I have granted you solace,’ she said. ‘Build me a temple.’
By morning, well rested, he had forgotten his dream, but could not rouse his men to load the mules. They slept soundly on until the afternoon. There would not be time enough to leave the jungle by nightfall. As Reva Nayak slept by the spring for another night, the young girl again appeared – ‘You have forgotten my temple,’ she said. In the morning, Reva Nayak had his men begin work, and it is these temples that now gleam white at the source. I heard this story from Ram Prasad Druve, a Pardhan Gond in the village of Sonpuri. There was no mention of the older temple complex. For Pardhans, the story of the Narmada begins with the Reva kings.
Anthropologically, the Gond are of Dravidian origin and once spoke a language akin to Tamil and Telugu. By the fourteenth century, Gond were certainly ruling in the town of Mandla, about one hundred kilometres downriver. If oral tradition is reliable, the Gond probably came to Amarkantak only after the twelfth century. They are often referred to as ‘tribal’, which is misleading for those who associate the word with the unexplored interior of Papua New Guinea or the dense jungles of the Amazon.
There are more than ten million Gond, and many are still forest dwellers, but just as many took up agriculture centuries ago. Once rulers in their own right before being marginalised by larger populations around them, the Gond are finding a voice in regional and national legislatures. They are as much a ‘tribe’ as the Mayans or the Aztecs.
Ram Prasad Dhruve lives barely thirty kilometres from the source of the river. Like so many other Pardhans, he tends his fields for much of the year.
It is when he sets out every other year on a long journey to visit his ‘patrons’ that he becomes reborn. The journey may take Ram Prasad several months because these patrons, the jajman, are scattered over a vast territory; some live several hundred kilometres from his village. They await his arrival and if by the third year they do not see him, they will send for him. Calamities, they believe, befall households where the ruling deity of the Gond, Bada Deo, has not been invoked. But it is only their Pardhan who can do so, who can make the music that summons Bada Deo.
In a world spun of stories, the Pardhans have several versions of this tale; the one Ram Prasad tells me invokes seven Gond brothers working in their father’s fields:
They saw a handsome young man mounted on a white steed ride through the fields. Fearing for their crops they gave chase. Only the youngest stayed back out of fear. At the edge of the fields, the horse and rider vanished. It was then they realised they had seen Bada Deo incarnate. Angered, he had taken refuge in the Saja tree.
The brothers prayed and pleaded; they sacrificed to Bada Deo. It did not work. Eventually, the youngest gathered enough courage to find out what had happened. He went into the jungle and fashioned a string instrument out of a branch of the Khirsari tree. In his hands it soared, producing a music none of them had heard before. Pleased, Bada Deo appeared before them and said, ‘This instrument will be called the bana, and whenever you play it I will become manifest.’
From that day on, the brothers told the youngest he would not have to work on the fields. ‘You will get your share of our produce for playing the bana. Even when we die you will share out property and our children will follow the same rules.’ The Pardhans are the descendants of the youngest son.
Knowing the genealogy of his jajmans and the art of playing the bana are the patrimony of Ram Prasad Druve, and his father’s jajmans have been shared equally between him and his brothers.
When Ram Prasad arrives at the home of any one of his jajmans he is welcomed with due ceremony. An offering of grain awaits him, new clothes and, if a rare jajman has the means, even silver, gold, cattle and the gift of land. In addition there always will be mahua, Bada Deo’s gift to mankind.
The fabric of stories has words for this gift as well:
One day it came to be that Bada Deo ventured out in this world. It was late afternoon and the king had chosen the occasion to feed his entire populace. As Bada Deo wandered the streets he found men lying somnolent by the roadside, sapped of energy. To ensure they would never again feel so, he gave them the art of distilling mahua from the flowers of the mahua tree. From that day on joy, laughter and dance found a home in the world. Ever since, no religious ceremony of the Gond has taken place in the absence of mahua.
Seated at the centre of the courtyard at his jajman’s home, Ram Prasad unveils the bana and awaits the offering of mahua. The reverence is appropriate; no other instrument is Bada Deo incarnate, no other liquor is his spirit. After a sip of mahua from a cupped sal leaf, Ram Prasad begins to tune the plaintive cry of the bana, played much like a fiddle. Then, with a stroke of his bow, he begins the invocation of Bada Deo.
He sings the genealogy of his patrons. Their origins are his origins. He sings of the valour of the dead, of battles fought, of kingdoms founded and forts built, a recitation of deeds that come down the generations to the men sitting before him. In the day or two that he spends there, Ram Prasad adds to his knowledge of the clan the names of the newly born and the recently deceased.
Once every three-to-five years, Ram Prasad will gather together all his patrons in an open clearing to help the spirits of those who have died since the last such gathering find release. Each household enshrines the memory of their dead in a particular object, a kunta, which is brought to the clearing by the jajmans and hidden.
Ram Prasad, reclining in new clothes, begins the invocation of Bada Deo and, to the sound of his playing, one of the gathered people becomes host to the spirit. The spirit first seeks water and, charged by its presence, the host runs towards the nearest source of water – a well, a pond or river – and plunges in. Such is the power of the spirit, Ram Prasad says, that the host can leap from a well. Refreshed, the spirit goes in search of each memory, prising the kunta from their hiding places and puts them in a basket slung from a pole. After three days, the basket is immersed in water and the spirits of the dead are released.
Ram Prasad Dhruve playing the bana. (Photo by John H. Bowles)
So Ram Prasad Dhruve tells me. Every pause, every gesture, every exclamation is inextricably bound to a narrative that is created anew at each telling. Not every Pardhan can play the bana, and not every Pardhan is a master storyteller. The few who are able to do both are known to all.
One night, I watched a Pardhan from the distant village of Garkamatha throw the Pardhans of Sonpuri a challenge. ‘You are wise and learned,’ he began, ‘you are the repositories of stories. I ask you two simple questions – where is there water without mud, and where is the fire that does not singe?’
Serious debate ensues, for these are serious questions, but everyone listening knows it is only ritual leading up to stories. In an open courtyard under the clear night sky, just a kilometre from the Narmada, a Gond Pardhan tells of Ganga’s descent from the heavens. It is in Shiva’s matted locks that there is water without mud; and the fire that does not singe is the story of Prahlad, devotee of Vishnu, who did not forsake his devotion even in the face of torture by his father, Hiranyakashyap.
As the Pardhan narrated the tale of Ganga’s descent, he asked another question: ‘Why is the water of the Ganga [Ganges] so pure?’ And in answer he told of Vishnu’s Vamana avatar, how Vishnu in the form of a dwarf asked for a mere three strides of land to vanquish the pride of the ruler of the earth. Granted the boon, Vishnu became manifest and as his stride exhausted the earth, his foot reached the heavens. Brahma, aware of Vishnu’s presence, washed the foot and collected the water. This became the sacred water of the Ganges.
The Pardhan again turned to the assembled audience and asked if they knew why Vishnu had to assume the form of a dwarf, and so began another story in an eternal stream that was without beginning, without end.
For the Sonpuri Pardhans, some of these stories were new; by the end of the evening they made them their own. The Pardhans are, first and foremost, storytellers, and a memory honed on intricate genealogy accommodates everything in its own fashion. It is difficult to talk of borrowings and influences. Many of the stories are told in one form or other in different parts of India. It makes sense to come to this truth from across the globe, for the stories have spread far.
In 1977, Jorges Luis Borges gave seven lectures at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires. He began his third lecture by speaking of the discovery of the East by the West, and concluded by talking about The Thousand and One Nights, ‘a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory’.
‘It is the work of thousands of authors, and none of them knew that he was helping to construct this illustrious book,’ Borges said, and referred to a note transcribed by the Austrian Orientalist, Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who was fascinated by the origins of Nights. ‘He speaks of certain men he calls confabulators nocturni, men whose profession it is to tell stories during the night. He cites an ancient Persian text which states that the first person to hear such stories told, who gathered the men of the night to tell stories in order to ease his insomnia, was Alexander of Macedon.’
The tales that form the core of the Nights can be traced back to the twelfth century Kashmiri text Kathasaritsagara, or The Ocean of Stories. Its author, Somadeva, admits his book is based on a much older source, the Brihat Katha by Gunadhya, which dates back to the century before the Common Era. The story of stories goes that Gunadhya, a sage residing in the forest, composed seven volumes of tales told over 700,000 verses. He chose to relate his tales in the Paisachi language. This language, probably of Dravidian origin, did not find favour with the king, who was a scholar of Sanskrit, so the sage retired to the forest and read his tales to the animals. As he finished a volume, he consigned it to the flames. So immersed were the animals in his tales, they forgot to eat and the king fell ill for want of healthy game. His courtiers reached Gunadhya just in time to save the seventh and final volume from the fire. It is this volume that engendered the Kathasaritasagara, which in turn gave rise to Nights.
There is good reason to suppose Paisachi was a Dravidian language spoken between the Narmada and the Godavri; even today Gunadhya would find himself at home among the Gond, who in many of the regions they inhabit remain forest dwellers. Sitting among the Pardhans in the heart of Gondwana is perhaps as close as one can get to those first storytellers of the night.
* * *
An idea of being Gond is born out of the narratives of the Pardhans. A chance occurrence, the vision of one man and the talent of another is now opening up the way for the world to rediscover the Gond through their eyes.
The story begins in 1979 when poet and painter Jagdish Swaminathan took charge of Bharat Bhawan, a new cultural centre in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh. Believing that traditional crafts of the region’s tribals could be looked at purely in terms of their artistic merit, he sent out a team of young artists. In the village of Patangarh they found on the walls of a hut a painting of Hanuman. It was the work of a young Pardhan Gond named Jangarh Singh Shyam.
Two Tigers Under a Tree (detail), by Jangarh Singh Shyam, acrylic on canvas,
50.5 x 94", 1992; collection of John H. Bowles; photo by Edgard Rincon.
The Friendship of the Tiger and the Boar (detail), by Jangarh Singh Shyam (1960-2001),
acrylic on canvas, 43.5 x 31.5", c. 1989; collection of John H. Bowles; photo by Edgard Rincon.
Scorpion, by Jangarh Singh Shyam, ink and watercolours on paper, 28 x 22",
1993; collection of John H. Bowles; photo by Edgard Rincon.
Within a decade Jangarh’s murals adorned the dome of Bharat Bhawan and the open halls of the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly. In 1989, he was the Indian representative at the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Prior to Jangarh’s recognition, tribal art in India had been viewed mainly for its insight into a ‘tribal world’ – no one had become an individual presence in the world of art. In the same few rooms that they were first allotted, adjacent to one of the government bungalows in Bhopal’s Professor Colony, Jangarh’s widow, Nankusia, a Pardhan from Sonpuri, lives and paints. The room in which we meet is bare, lit only by the pale blue glow of a flickering fluorescent light.
She sits on a rug on the floor, two of her children, Japani and Manish, to one side listening to their mother talk of their father:
We were from neighbouring villages. My sister had been married to his brother but it did not work out. He first saw me at a family wedding in Patangarh and then started visiting our house regularly. My parents thought he was there to meet my brother but even then he would joke that he would marry me. I would laugh at him. I was young, barely fourteen or fifteen, but I was on the taller side and he was short. Yet I could not help but notice him. He could play the flute so well, the tabla, the dholak. I keep his instruments with me.
One day, when a group of us had gone to see the Dussehra at Gorakhpur, the two of us fell behind the rest of the group while returning late at night. He promised to walk me home, saying that he just had a bit of work to take care of in his village. We went to his aunt’s house. On some pretext or other, he kept me there until morning. In Sonpuri, word spread that I had run away with him.
A week later, when I was working in the fields, my mother took me away. I was sent to stay with relatives in the village of Garkamatha, where I had already been betrothed. A few months later I met Jangarh again at a village fair. He asked after me and I told him I could not imagine being married to anyone else. He took me to his village, but I could not stay at his house. His father was opposed to the marriage, but came around after consulting a local healer. But before anything could be done Jangarh’s father fell ill and died. We got married shortly after.
We were very badly off at the time. His sister had been abandoned by her husband, along with her two children. We were supporting the entire family, and the only work we could do was to labour in other people’s fields. Jangarh would even go out to help with the earthwork for erecting electric poles. He would spend his entire day digging and carrying earth.
Things began to change when we moved to Bhopal. At first, we lived in a slum before Swaminathan found us this place. Swaminathan made sure he was in regular touch with Jangarh. He would ask Jangarh to think of deities in the village such as Durga and paint them. He would give him paper and paint; all of Jangarh’s earliest paintings are on paper.
Whenever Jangarh would paint, he would be totally obsessed. He would work all day long at Bharat Bhawan and start his own work in the evening. He would often use material from the stories he had heard, or he would ask elders to relate such stories.
To see the evolution in Jangarh’s vision from his early paintings on paper is to appreciate the strength of Swaminathan’s judgment. Jangarh achieved a form that was rooted in his tradition. For a Pardhan to go from relating stories to illustrating them was an understandable step, but Jangarh’s talent was his own. A Japanese institution studying another traditional painting form that had travelled from walls to canvas, the Mithila art of Bihar, extended Jangarh an invitation, Nankusia says. ‘He first travelled to Japan for about ten days. He really liked it, so much so that we named out daughter Japani.’
He then went back to Japan for three months. On his return I went to receive him at Calcutta. He did not say much, but he told me had felt very lonely because everyone spoke angrezi [literally, ‘foreign’].
For some reason, the woman from Calcutta who had organised his trip kept his passport with her. She kept asking him to make another trip to Japan. He gave one excuse after another.
He finally agreed to go, telling me that this would be the last time and on his return he could think about leaving his job and devoting himself fully to being a painter. He also kept saying he needed to get his passport back.
From Japan he would write to me, but we rarely spoke on the phone. He was not happy there – he wrote that he wanted to come back, but that the people there wanted him to extend his visa by another six months.
He felt things had changed since his last visit. People related to him differently. He asked me to write to him in our language because he felt his letters were being read. Then he wrote saying that his departure had been finalised and he would be arriving shortly.
It was July 1, 2001 when I got a call from him. He didn’t say a word on hearing my voice, he just started crying. When I asked him what was wrong, all he said was that he was missing the children.
The next day I got a call from the passport office. They asked if there was anyone else at home so I gave the phone to his nephew. I thought they were calling about extending his visa; I had no idea how these things worked. I told his nephew not to let them extend the visa. It was then we learn that Jangarh was dead.
Some claim he was murdered; it is not clear exactly what happened in Japan. The Madhya Pradesh government paid to have his body returned.
It is difficult to sort truth from invention concerning Jangarh’s death. Results of the post-mortem in Bhopal have not been released, but relatives claim it ruled out hanging, though the doctor responsible told me that was indeed the cause of death. Neither government is interested in an enquiry. Certainly, Jangarh seemed depressed in Japan and was on medication. A degree of paranoia was inevitable in surroundings where he understood no one and, after staying with some painters from Bihar, was later on his own.
For a man rooted in his community, used to the ease of interaction that is a given in India, there could have been a few places more alien than Japan. More than village and tribe, it is the language we speak and the people who surround us that allow us to feel a sense of home.
‘I don’t know what they did to him,’ says Nankusia. ‘No one ever called me from Japan, no one ever wrote to me. The woman from Calcutta did not even take my calls to her mobile. My husband had faced and dealt with extreme poverty in Patangarh. Such a man would not go to Japan and die. If he had to die, he would die in Patangarh, or in Bhopal. He had three children, a good job; his paintings were selling; he commanded respect. Would he commit suicide in Japan? No I don’t think so – I don’t believe it.’
In that room, in her presence with her children looking on, I found it difficult to believe that a man who had painted a sea of stories could be defeated by a silence he could not understand. But as the Pardhans well know, this story doesn’t end here, no story ever does.
* * *
Thirty kilometres from Amarkantak on the main road to Dindori, a dirt track branches off towards Sonpuri and Ram Prasad Druve’s home. I have driven my three companions the 400 kilometres from Bhopal in an old, battered Maruti. With me is John Bowles, a collector and student of Gond art, perhaps one of a few remaining amateur collectors of Gond art driven by passion rather than profit. Bowles supported Gond artists when few others saw merit in what they were doing. With passable Hindi, Bowles has sat with the artists to transcribe the stories that have given birth to this art. The walls of his California home show perhaps the largest private collection of Gond art in the world. We are going to the source of Gond art, accompanied on our journey by Subhash and Durga Vyam, among the best known of this generation of Pardhan Gond painters.
The road we follow is not an easy one; it winds up into the hills and dusk makes it difficult to negotiate the deep ruts carved out by tractors and jeeps, which scrape ominously at the little car’s drive shaft. A half-hour of anxious driving takes us to the summit and a low plateau where the road flattens out through fields dotted with yellow. We pass through a few villages, quite unlike the habitation of non-tribal India. Each hut stands in isolation from the rest, surrounded by a field or two hedged off by lantana. The main land holdings of the village lie below on the plains; a chequerboard valley of fields, mustard and green, slopes down to a tributary of the Narmada, rising again towards the blue hills where the fields meet the forest. As we near Sonpuri, in the last light of dusk, tints of red and orange play in the cirrus on the horizon. Subhash tells us we are only a thousand metres or so from the Narmada.
Our mud hut, home for the next ten days, is much like any other: its rooms open onto a central courtyard; farm animals occupy one wing; all around are murals that far exceed anything the team from Bharat Bhawan could have conceived when they first walked into Patangarh. Our sleeping room is a work in progress; Subhash’s elder brother, Pyare Lal, has begun illustrating the creation myth of the Gond. The figures he paints are cramped and intense, a contrast to the far more expansive work of his son, Gangaram, which adorn the outside walls. Their palette extends well beyond the muted red, yellow and white used in the traditional geometric floor patterns.
As in any Gond household, deities jostle for space – at the entrance stands Dehri Devi, goddess of the threshold, in the kitchen Chulha Deo, god of the hearth. The painters in Bhopal have given faces to the gods, except for Bada Deo, who only ever takes the form of the bana.
Subhash is Nankusia’s brother, Jangarh’s brother-in-law. He grew up in this village, married Durga Bai here, and if Jangarh’s success had not come along, the two would have been neighbours.
Durga and Subhash Vyam at their home in Sonpuri. The artwork is by Gangaram.
(Photo by John H. Bowles)
Gangaram with his wood carvings.
(Photo by John H. Bowles)
Their story is that of a school of art, begun in the rooms where I had sat with Nankusia. After Jangarh moved to Bharat Bhawan, his relatives followed him to Bhopal. With few jobs to be had, Jangarh set them to work on his paintings – initially colouring his sketches, later sketching and painting parts of larger pieces themselves. As demand grew, more and more painters left Patangarh to work in Jangarh’s studio, many fleeing the same poverty that drove Jangarh to manual labour. Subhash recalls: ‘I barely studied to the fifth standard. Pyare Lal and my father were both doing work on barkhi for other households. That meant that for a sum of about one thousand rupees a year they would live in that household and do all that was asked of them in the fields. Our fields had been mortgaged and even our brass vessels had been pawned. I took up a number of odd jobs to sustain the family.’ Jangarh had seen some of Subhash’s clay figurines and found a place for him in his studio in Bhopal. Durga was also encouraged by Jangarh to paint. Today, Subhash, Durga, Ganga Ram and Pyare Lal are all well-known Gond artists. Durga is just back from a trip to Frankfurt, Pyare Lal from Calcutta.
Patangarh is a ten-minute walk from Sonpuri. As the Pardhans in the village saw the success and wealth that came the way of Jangarh, it was as if every household had a painter. We are invited to the home of Bhajju Shyam, probably the best-known Gond painter today. As we sit and talk to his parents, John tells me of Bhajju’s recent visit to London, which resulted in The London Jungle Book (Tara Publishing, India, 2004); ‘He returns – after a century – Kipling’s gaze, with an equal sense of wonder, adventure, humour and directness of expression,’ the book jacket says. To my mind, he has painted and written about the city with bemusement and sympathy: ‘Times have changed. I live in a city now, and I have been on a plane to London. That’s not to say I’ll throw my tradition away. I can’t – it’s in me. The new is done with the old in the blood. So even the pictures I draw of London – they will have a Gond twist, be a Gond view of London.’
* * *
In the course of our stay at Sonpuri, we set off one morning for the Narmada with Subhash and Rajendra Kushram, a boy from Patangarh who has been extremely curious about our stay at the village. As we walk along a path that slopes gently to the river, Subhash speaks of the receding jungle – the terrain through which we walk was mostly jungle once. The jungle was never a menacing place, but Subhash recalls taboos associated with the river. ‘Even ten or fifteen years back, our elders would caution us against wandering along the banks of the river early in the morning or close to sunset.’ Th is used to be tiger territory, but that wasn’t it. ‘We would go to the river only at midday … because this was where the spirits dwelt. Now there are too many men and the spirits have left the world.’
Subhash spoke of the jungle with a nostalgia evident in the scenes Pyare Lal has painted on the walls of the hut detailing the creation myth of the Gond. One panel does not fit in, and when we ask Subhash about it he talks of the time when he was very young. ‘It was almost forty years ago that I went to the jungle for the first time. We spent the night there by a stream. In the morning, when I went to fetch water, I saw this bird holding an antelope at bay as they circled each other. I have never again seen anything like it.’
The Narmada we reach is now no more than a large stream, the water barely up to our waists. Even in November the afternoon sun is warm enough for us to laze in the water, stepping out only to talk to two passing parikramawasis. Nirmalananda Puri and his companion have been on the parikrama for six months. They are traditional, walking barefoot and staying close to the banks.
Nirmalananda, the younger of the two, is the more articulate. He is twenty-nine, from Ferozepur in Punjab. He left his home to join the Dasnami sect when he was seventeen. He says all this in English. ‘I then studied for my MA in philosophy at Benares Hindu University. I have been to Holland, Germany, Spain and Switzerland with my guru. I have decided to settle down in Mandla at the end of the parikrama, I have already bought land for my ashram.’ I ask what has brought him from the banks of the Ganges to this parikrama. He quotes from the Upanishads, then translates for me, ‘The Chhand Upanishad says that one must renounce the world on the banks of the Jahnvi (a name for the Ganges), and meditate by the Reva.’ Subhash and Rajendra touch his feet.
My mind goes back to the evening at Garkamatha where, to our surprise, one of the Pardhans broke off his recital of traditional myths to sing Sankara’s invocation to the Narmada. Suddenly, we were transported to another world where, to the strains of the bana, a Gond was reciting a Sanskrit composition by Hinduism’s foremost visionary. At some point of time in the eighth century, the story goes, Sankara attained enlightenment on the banks of this river. The Pardhan told us he had learned the invocation from passing parikramawasis, who would often stop the night in the village.
There are more parikramawasis now as the jungle – and its perceived menace – disappears. More of the outside world filters into the once-isolated region with them, and the Gond themselves are now more venturesome. In Garkamattha, none had done the parikrama until a decade back; now more than fifteen men from the village have completed the journey.
As we walk back in silence it seems to me that many different worlds are encroaching upon Sonpuri. But the encroachment of other sacred traditions is the least of the problems, which are far more of this world.
The fertile fields through which we walked will soon aggravate the problems of surplus and hierarchy. Men like Subhash bring in money from outside, whether as painters or government workers. Subhash has freed his fields from mortgage, but this is only a step away from buying new fields. Houses of brick and mortar are being built. It used to be that the necessarily equitable distribution of meagre resources meant there was no clear hierarchy in the village. It is clear, now, that some men are doing better than the rest. And patronage, whether by jajmans or the art market, is everything.
* * *
On our very first evening in Sonpuri we were told, more than once, ‘You are like gods; we have been blessed by your presence.’
For them we were much like their jajmans, and in case of John this was really true. A language honed under other circumstances was now directed our way. As patrons, the same munificence that the jajmans displayed was expected too, of us. The Pardhans, we learned from Subhash’s maternal uncle, Ajju Ram, ‘are here to relate stories. The eyes see, the ears hear, the nose smells and we tell stories.’ In much the same manner as their patrons, it was implicitly assumed that at the very least we should keep the mahua flowing. It was a year during which, they told us, the price of mahua had touched a new high. In some small measure we may have contributed.
In this context, the demon of authenticity always raises its head. Is such an art truly ‘primitive’ if it is for sale? Is it tailored to a meet a particular demand? I try to imagine what that first team from Bharat Bhawan found and their reaction when they saw Jangarh’s iconic representation of Hanuman carrying a mountain. To those familiar with the Ramayana, the context is immediate. Laxman lies dying in the battlefield; only the Sanjivni herb can bring him back. A Pardhan in Patangarh knew that Hanuman had neither the time nor the patience to search out a particular herb in the densely forested hillside, so he took the entire mountain. This was the context in which Jangarh lived, and it is in this context that this school of painting survives, but it is a delicate symbiosis. Without the outside world looking in, men such as Jangarh may have been consigned to a life of hard physical labour and much of Gond art that is valued today may well have been lost.
Rajendra leaves us at Patangarh, saying he wants to get something from his home. He reaches Sonpuri later in the evening and takes out a notebook. It resembles the register that schoolteachers use to keep attendance. Page after page is filled with neat, tightly spaced Hindi. There are twenty stories in the notebook, Rajendra says, told to him by his grandmother. Each story took him six or seven days to write down. He wants to know if his work has any worth.
I don’t really need to give him an answer. Rajendra has seen the artists who return from Bhopal ask their elders to repeat stories they heard in childhood. Rajendra’s stories are, to me at least, priceless.
When I go in search of a narrative, I am glad when one Pardhan Gond can tell of the origins of the Ganges. But my true delight is in the stories that tell of the origins of the Narmada, stories that are their common heritage. Time changes tradition, the world encroaches, but when a people learn to tell their own tales and feel free to shape London in their image, then there is reason to believe that they can tackle the world on their own terms.
