The 'Other Masters'

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.

© 1998