The 'Other Masters'

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.