Folk Art of India

The culture of India is one of the oldest in the world which is rich and diverse. Culture is everything in a particular society and Indian culture is no easy composite of varying styles and influences. Indian culture was moulded throughout various eras of history. It is medley of amazing diversities and startling contractions, but above all, it represents the multifaceted aspects of India as a whole.

Ancient Indian culture stood for an infinite variety of symbols and rituals. The fine arts were valued in ancient India primarily for their capacity to reveal something of the beauty and sublimity of the Divine.

India has managed to preserve its culture and traditions through the ages, all the while absorbing customs, traditions and ideas from both invaders and immigrants. Many cultural practices, languages, customs and dances are examples of this co-mingling over centuries. Thus, Indian culture is a composite mixture of varying styles and influences. Very few countries in the world have such an ancient and diverse culture as India.

Indian Art 

Art, is a very precious heritage in the culture of a people. It is more so in India, where the story of art is as old as the history of the race - a panorama of five thousand years. The essential quality of Indian Art is its preoccupation with things of the spirit. Art in India did not aim at objective presentation of the human or social facets of life. It was primarily the fruit of the artist's creative meditation and effort to project symbols of divine reality as conceived and understood by the collective consciousness of the people as a whole. It is a vast, unending social and religious endeavour of devotees to depict the forms of the Gods and Goddesses they worshipped. 

Indian painting has a history of over two thousand years and presents a comprehensive record of the religious and emotional life of the people. The art of painting was widely cultivated in the Gupta period and is best known through the paintings surviving in the Ajanta Elora caves, and also in the Bagh caves. 

India is the custodian of valuable traditions, social, moral and artistic. The concept of traditional culture, introduces new complexities. It implies tat what is traditional is always worth conserving. The tradition if folk art reflects the continuous play of line and colour which is native to the mind of India.  

Folk Art 

It is far easy to identify a folk form but as much difficult to define. Its definitions vary from the art of tribes, primitive people, ethnic groups to an art by family traditions. 

Folk Art discovers its themes from things around. Every ethnic group has its own stimuli - things and occasions that emotionally move, which give each a different character. However, folk art in its entirely celebrates joy, festivities, ceremonial occasions, and shuns sensouousness, voluptuous modeling, more vehemently nudeness and all forms of obscenity. Diction of flesh is not its idiom. The folk artist creates forms from within the rituals, myths and legends, by which he adorns, or rather sanctifies, daily living - things that matter in life.

In Folk Art spontaneity substitutes reason. It uses instead the creative faculty of mind - art imagination, a faculty that assimilates and creates. This power to assimilate gives to folk art its unique mythology - a world beyond average man's perception, in which the sun and moon have  a simultaneous presence, trees grow over a deer's head, a tree with a human trunk, or birds, its foliage.

To be creative in folk mind's innate nature, to which medium, technique, training...….are irrelevant. In whatever around, a piece of paper, cloth, wood, clay, metal, thrown away pieces of a waste, it discovers its medium. Wall is very often its canvas, and for rendering a painting on it a few pieces of thrown away ropes might suffice. The Sarguja Artist will mould them into desired forms, a bed of flowering plants - stems, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fix them on the wall and paint them with colored muds - white,, ocre, yellow. Ignorant of it, he creates not three-dimentional effects but a painting with three dimentions. A Bastar tribesman finds his material in pieces of rejected iron for a statue. Such multiplicity of material and ability to transform it into an art medium gives to folk art such generic width, which a single essay might not encompass.   

A folk painting is composed of overlapping forms, irrational anatomy, irregular imagery, and random motifs but its polyphonic character has an amazing coherence and unity; perhaps, because its images are endowed with the power to speak to each viewer in his diction and tell him his tale. This apart, born of the tradition under which it was part of a ritual. or deity-feast, marriage, birth, festival type sacred or auspicious accasions, a folk painting is endowed with underlying spiritual tones, which thread into an unseen unity its apparent diversities. This spiritual connotations is folk painting's essence, spirit and soul. To the artist, individual in hisact is heroic, but along it myriad other events keep unfolding, and the artist finds his world widening beyond his individual and beyond his act. To the folk artist the world is not an individual's island. So to him is time, a continuum and indivisible process. Hence, in his art, events of past, future and present exist in simultaneity, and legends, myths and fantasy - things of far gone days, are found interwoven with the contemporary. In his epic one story unfolds into another and so on in an endless chain. 

Indian folk painting 

Folk painting is assuredly the oldest traditional art still being created inn India. The earliest examples - images of animals and hunters found on rock shelters in the region of modern Bhopal in the Central India - date back more than seven thousand years.  

The Folk paintings are living traditions, which can be classified into two categories: those that are executed on ritual occasions for the express purpose of 'installing' a deity, and those that are essentially narrative in character, the themes of narration being primarily from the ancient Indian epics. These may be executed on a wall (Bhitti-chitra), on a canvas (Pata-chitra), and on the floor (Bhumi-chitra).   

Folk Art is the creative expression of those who uninfluenced by princely ostentation and ecclesiastic conservatism, revealed in lines and forms what they had within and around. Her ten-twelve thousand years old creative culture and a wide-spread art geography apart, India has hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own taste, aspirations, joys, sorrows, struggles and a creative talent. Education or training wasn't their tool. They had instead massive imagination, passion to embellish, and to things, scattered around, status of art imagery - all that transformed into artists, not just individuals but communities, generations after generations. In a world every minute seeking means to distort and destroy they have kept along their own tenor singing to their own tunes, dancing to the notes of their hearts, and discovering in jumble of things, rough crude lines, and raw colors, a world that breathed purity, harmony, respect and concern for life, and a strange stoicism.   

Indian folk paintings are divisible into three categories: professional, or commercial; votive reproductions of deity images;  and domestic. First two paintings types are remunerative, while the third, aesthetic. Professional painting is free to choose any theme, religious or secular; votive paintings adheres to the image-type it seeks to reproduce. Though now commercialized, a domestic painting - a paper transform of traditional floor and wall paintings, was initially ritual, decorative and for personal delight. Elaborate Madhubani or Mithila compositions, indigenous paintings of Gonds of Madhya Pradesh, Bengal folks, and pictographs of tribes like Warli of Maharashtra, Saura of Orissa, Kurumbha of Tamilnadu, Santhals of Bengal-Bihar, Bils of Gujarat-Madhya Pradesh, define the domestic idiom of folk art.     

Domestic paintings has its roots in rock-shelter pictographs. Harappan drawings on its pottery, as well as animal and human forms in its terracotta figurines, reveal continuity of these pre-historic pictographs. Human and animal figures on early coins adhere to same iconographic forms. Tattooing, perhaps am art prevalent across ages, has similar line-drawing technique as hard rock-shelters. Floor drawings and wall paintings, a part of marriage-like auspicious rituals, represents the final stage in the growth of folk-art from rock-shelter drawings to canvas painting. It is essentially this common tradition that imparts to art-styles of most tribes - bhils, Warlis, Gondiyas, Kurumbhas, Sauras, Santhals and others, striking similarity.