The past should be a springboard, not a cage — or so Laila Tyabji, designer, writer and crafts activist, has written in a recent book review. Jangarh Singh Shyam, Pema Fatya, Lado Bai and Bhuri Bai disregarded the restrictive label of Adivasi artist and excelled as contemporary artists by virtue of the sheer brilliance of their imagination and power of innovation, more often than not, in defiance of traditions. In the words of the Bhopal-based artist, Akhilesh, they are now “likhendras” — one who ‘writes’ a ‘painting’ — whose talents have gained world-wide recognition. These artists were ‘discoveries’ of Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994), one of the most influential Indian artists himself, who set up Bharat Bhawan, a multi-art complex in Bhopal, in 1982, and served as the director of its Roopankar Museum of Fine Arts till 1990.

Bhuri Bai, Untitled (Autobiographical series) ,2018 (Poster Colour on Paper) [TRI Art & Culture]

TRI Art & Culture recently held the exhibition, Bhuri Bai: My Life as an Artist, which focused on the autobiographical stimulus of the art of this woman who belongs to the Bhil tribe from Madhya Pradesh. Bhuri Bai was born in the late 1960s in Moti Bawdi in Pithol village, Jhabua district, Madhya Pradesh, and lived on the neck of a dense jungle, which was also the provider for her perpetually poverty-stricken family. Her father was a daily-wage worker in Pithol. Her mother had taught her the basics of farming and Bhuri Bai took the cattle out for grazing.

In 1980, when Bhuri Bai was a married young woman, she was working at the construction site of Bharat Bhawan as a daily-wage labourer when she encountered Swaminathan. Among the Bhils, most of the ceremonial art is the handiwork of men, but Bhuri Bai used to assist her mother in painting motifs and designs of Pithora wall paintings. Swaminathan persuaded her to take up painting and, for the first time, she used paper and synthetic paint. She painted her life-story on a wall of Janajati Sangrahalay and 52 other works that were displayed at Bharat Bhawan. Like other artists from Adivasi communities, Bhuri Bai broke the shackles of religion and symbolism and discovered a fount of inspiration in her own life.

Bhuri Bai’s appropriation of the icons, symbols and pictorial representation of an age-old tribal community meant to convey messages is amazing. Borrowing that language, she represents her village home and the trees, birds and beasts — both domesticated and wild — that were all part of the world in which she grew up. People are returning from the Bhagoria festival, a peacock and her chicks are foraging, humans are reduced to animated stick figures, and the animals to their basic framework — horses to twin pyramids with kissing apexes on four legs, for example. But instead of the earthen colours used in traditional Pithora art, Bhuri Bai’s paintings pulsate with psychedelic colours and lines against stark white backgrounds.

Saryu Doshi had, in an essay in Marg’s June 1992 issue, written: “The exposure to the outside world has had its impact on tribal art. In many places new motifs intrude into traditional designs and it is not unusual to observe a truck incorporated into a panel featuring geometrical and stylised motifs.” So Bhuri Bai shows herself in an aeroplane flying to the US where her exhibition was being held. She turned tradition on its head.