Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962 to 2001) is credited as the creator of a new school of Indian art known as Jangarh Kalam. His work carried the Pardhan Gond tradition from village walls onto paper and canvas, and later inspired graphic novels including Bhimayana.
Jangarh was born in 1962 into a Pardhan Gond family in the village of Patangarh in the Mandla region of eastern Madhya Pradesh. He grew up in extreme poverty, which forced him to leave school, and he grazed buffaloes and sold milk in a nearby town. The Pardhan Gond community is traditionally one of musicians who once received patronage from the Gond Rajas, a patronage that eroded under colonial and later administrative changes.
His life changed in October 1981, when talent scouts from the Bhopal arts museum Bharat Bhavan came to his village. There he met the museum's first director, the artist Jagdish Swaminathan, who convinced him to work as a professional artist in Bhopal. Swaminathan showcased Jangarh's first sample paintings at Bharat Bhavan's inaugural exhibition in February 1982, and he was soon employed in the museum's graphic arts department.
Fame came quickly. In 1986, only five years after his discovery, the twenty-six-year-old was given the Shikhar Samman, the highest civilian award of the Government of Madhya Pradesh. He painted murals for the new legislative building in Bhopal designed by the architect Charles Correa, and in 1989 his art was shown at the Pompidou Centre's Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris.
His style translated Pardhan music into visual form. He built shapes from lines of coloured dots inspired by Gond tattoos, alongside dense cross-hatching, comb-lines and bands of dots, and used radiating contours to suggest power or movement. The primary subjects were Gond deities such as Thakur Dev and Bada Deo, along with cutout-style portraits of tigers, deer, turtles and crocodiles. He was among the first Gond artists to use paper and canvas, inaugurating what is now called Jangarh Kalam.
Jangarh became a hub for his community. His house in Bhopal's Professors Colony drew many Pardhan Gond artists who hoped he would show them the way, and several extended the style into sculpture. Among the artists who carved out reputations in his wake are Bhajju Shyam, author of the acclaimed London Jungle Book, along with Ram Singh Urveti and Rajendra Shyam.
His death cut the story short. In 2001, during his second residency at the Mithila Museum in Tokamachi, Japan, Jangarh died by suicide. The reasons remain unclear, and the Indian artistic community criticised the circumstances of his residency. Upon his death, artists including M. F. Husain and Manjit Bawa urged the governments of India and Japan to inquire into what had happened, and a 1988 piece of his later sold for 31,250 dollars at Sotheby's in New York in 2010, a first for an Adivasi artist.
The lineage reached comics directly. Jangarh brought his brother-in-law Subhash Vyam and Subhash's wife Durgabai Vyam into the art world, and in 2011 the two co-authored Bhimayana, a graphic biography of B. R. Ambedkar published by Navayana. The book is dedicated to Jangarh and uses Pardhan Gond visual conventions, including digna patterns, an explicit bridge from tribal folk art to the modern Indian graphic novel.
Compiled from public records.
