ONE OF THE MORE DEPRESSING ways to spend an evening in New Delhi is to do a round of art-gallery openings. You wander from party to party, through rooms filled with elegant women in glittering saris, men with checkbooks at the ready. Wherever you go, almost without exception, you see wall after wall hung with that generic, slightly distorted figurative art that would have looked ""modern'' in a Paris or New York studio in, say, 1927. What, you wonder, happened to 3,000 years of one of the world's most wondrous art traditions?
Though it may not be apparent to many gallery hoppers, that great tradition is alive and well in the Indian countryside. Visitors to New Delhi can now see the work of five ""folk'' artists in a wonderful show, ""Other Masters,'' at the city's Crafts Museum (through mid-July). The artists, four working, one a woman now dead, are from widely separated parts of India. Three are painters, one a sculptor, one a potter. What they have in common is that they have taken very old, static forms and turned them into living, evolving arts.
Painter Jivya Soma Mashe, 65, works on the veranda of his stone house in a hot, cactus-infested field in Maharashtra state in western India. Clad in shorts and an old T shirt, the artist mixes up a gray-green solution of liquid cow dung before beginning his next work. He soaks the goo into a piece of cotton cloth, and when it has dried he takes a splinter of bamboo, dips it in thick poster color and covers that surface with his world. The cotton will come alive with a mass of stylized human figures, rats, birds, tigers, trains, buses--anything he might see in the few miles between his house and the railway town he occasionally visits to get his artist's materials. At one level, his paintings are abstract swirls of movement. At another, says the artist, ""it's just what I see around me.''
Jivya Mashe was the first man among his people, the Warli, to become a painter. Until about 30 years ago painting was done by women, who put the same unchanging shapes of gods and goddesses on village walls for ceremonies like marriages. Becoming a painter was Mashe's first break with tradition. Then he moved from painting on walls to paper and cloth, and from religious subjects to his secular style. Another, younger artist in the show, Jangarh Singh Shyam, 37, also made the move from wall painting to paper. Now he uses brilliant poster color to render traditional gods and animals as well as modern subjects like airplanes.
Sonabai, who might be called an installation artist in the West, is now about 67 (she's not sure when she was born), and turned to painting out of boredom. She was married, totally uneducated, at the age of 14, in a village in the forests of Madhya Pradesh in central India. She moved into a large house, and, as she said in an interview before the show opened, she felt lonely because her husband was away working. ""So to occupy myself and have company I began to construct clay figures of human beings, deities, birds and animals all by myself,'' Sonabai said. ""They became my companions.''
Jyotindra Jain, the senior director of the Crafts Museum, told her to come to New Delhi to re-create her world in his museum. He gave her a large bare room. ""She came here with cow manure and bundles of rice straw and clay. She smeared the walls with her hands to create an undulating background pattern, then outlined and painted trees and plants. Then, using the straw as a core, she started making these birds and animals from the cow manure and clay, and either attached them to the walls or made free-standing figures.'' The whole room has now become a sort of forest clearing: trees cover the walls, monkeys and birds play in the branches.
Neelamani Devi, the show's potter, comes from a village in the remote northeastern Indian state of Manipur. The potter's wheel never appeared there, so women molded every pot by hand from lumps of clay. They produced rough-surfaced reddish earthenware, with occasional smoke stains from the wood-fired kilns. Devi has changed simple household ware into an art form. Entranced by the smoke stains, she arranged flues within the kiln so that the smoke would make stains of planned sizes on specific areas of the pots and jars. Then she started working the surface of the wet clay with abstract patterns, and hand-rubbed the coarse surface to a high polish. The result has been a series of elegant red and brown pots, patterned with cloudy black spots and patches, which would not look out of place among the best modern Japanese pottery.
If you can be renowned as a folk artist in India, then Ganga Devi achieved that fame--she was honored by the government before she died of breast cancer in 1991 at the age of 63. She, too, came from a tribal society, in the Mithila region of the central Indian state of Bihar, where women celebrated births, marriages and deaths with ritual paintings, mainly on walls and floors. Her life changed when she committed the unforgivable sin of not having children. Her husband married another woman and abandoned her, penniless, so she had to paint to support herself. Her paintings covered all aspects of her life yet remained very much in the traditional Mithila style, delicate pen-and-ink outlines usually filled with pale colors. Her last paintings are the most moving. When she was dying she recorded her visits to the medical clinic in New Delhi. The intricate backgrounds in her earlier work have disappeared. Instead, a woman lies on her gurney in a stark bare room, a fan overhead, a drip in her arm, dominated by the doctor standing over her. The overwhelming mood is one of loneliness and despair.
This is the first big show of Indian folk art ever to be held in India, and it would be nice to think that it might stimulate a greater interest in these artists. But it's hard to be optimistic. The most famous painters on the social circuit can get tens of thousands of dollars for their tributes to European modernism. Yet when I asked Jivya Soma Mashe what one of his large paintings would cost, he said hesitantly, ""1,500 rupees''--about $40. Strange to think that after 3,000 years, India could have lost its taste for its own art.