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Lot 34

 

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Jagdish Swaminathan began using tribal symbology of the kind seen in the present lot early in his career. Rejecting both Western influences in Indian modern art and the painters of the Bengal School who “reduced style in art… into a mannerism devoid of any plastic significance”, he drew deeply from archetypal symbols that bypass the noise of history to appeal to man’s ultimate heritage. (Jagdish Swamnathan, “Reality of the Image”, Contra... Jagdish Swaminathan began using tribal symbology of the kind seen in the present lot early in his career. Rejecting both Western influences in Indian modern art and the painters of the Bengal School who “reduced style in art… into a mannerism devoid of any plastic significance”, he drew deeply from archetypal symbols that bypass the noise of history to appeal to man’s ultimate heritage. (Jagdish Swamnathan, “Reality of the Image”, Contra ‘66 Number Two, New Delhi: Hem Chandra, 1966, p. 10) The potent pictorial language of this work carries a primal resonance, collapsing the temporal distance between modern man and his earliest forebears.

His enthusiasm for indigenous art was cemented on a trip to Betul in Madhya Pradesh with his wife in 1955. It was here he reinvigorated his enthusiasm for art while being profoundly moved by tribal life. An incident where a snake bite was treated by traditional efforts deeply impressed upon him the vitality of tribal practices. He said, “...roaming in the forest when we happened upon a Korku tribal village. A young boy had been bitten by a snake and the witch doctor was reviving the boy by continuous chant and throwing pots full of water on him. We watched in rapt fascination and soon enough the boy recovered and the snake, which had been imprisoned in an earthen pot, was let off and disappeared into a thick bamboo grove. This early encounter with tribal life was to have a deep impact on my later life.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cygan: An Auto-bio note”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 9)

Swaminathan’s use of a flat picture surface boldly places his works outside of the march of Western art history. Instead, he uses Indian folk imagery as his inspiration. The artist rejected linear perspective in recognition of folk art’s sophisticated utilisation of picture space. He argued, “The scope of tribal imagination is not contained by constraints of naturalism though it hovers over nature and derives its sustenance from it.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “Pre-naturalistic Art and Postnaturalistic Vision: An Approach to the Appreciation of Tribal Art”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 52)

By the time the present lot was painted in 1993, Swaminathan’s work had come full circle to his early tribal motifs, after about two decades exploring other styles in his Colour Geometry of Space and Bird, Mountain, Tree series. His commitment to tribal art was revitalised in the 1980s while searching for indigenous artists to include in the Bharat Bhavan museum, which he had been enlisted to set up in Madhya Pradesh. He said, “The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings.” (Swaminathan, “The Cygan: An Auto- bio Note”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, p. 13)