Features & Articles

The worlds woken up to tribal art
Article written by Rachna Rana Bhattacharya

Painter, teacher, researcher, social reformer. Listener of symphonies, lover of art and gourmet delights. One time big-game hunter turned tireless environmental activist, Bulu Imam wears many hats. Born to an aristocratic French mother who married into an eminent Muslim family studded with achievers, Bulu is a potent cocktail of contradictions who is equally comfortable in both his worlds the Western and the Indian one. Something of a maverick right from the start, he happily went his eclectic way flouting every social norm to marry two absolutely wonderful tribal women, with whose help he produced a large, very talented brood and now runs the Sanskriti Kendra in Hazaribagh.

Blessed with a remarkable joie de vivre, shiny, laughing eyes brimming with mischief and a mind that can absorb, analyse and distil things till he reached their very essence, Bulu went on to even greater things. Documenting the art heritage of the region, striving to preserve it and expose its majesty to the applause of the world. Teaching tribals to celebrate themselves and to seek modern ex-pression within traditional idioms, so that their art remains a breathing living thing, passed on to the next generation, instead of dying out with globalisation.

In 1993, he founded The Tribal Women Artists Co-operative (TWAC) to promote the regional village artforms of Khovar and Sohrai, which is a continuing tradition from the regions rock art. Bringing their ritual mural paintings to paper, making them instantly more accessible to the world. Nurtured under the aegis of the Hazaribagh Chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), TWAC currently promotes the work of over sixty artists in six villages, through exhibitions and sales of their work in India and abroad. The proceeds from which, are divided equally among the artists, a welfare fund and the maintenance of the Sanskriti Centre. The Centre also houses an Art Gallery with over 300 examples of tribal painting culled from eleven stylistic divisions, more contemporary cultural manifestations and a small but very interesting Museum. The Museum contains stone tools from the Mid-Pleistocene to the Neolithic, as well as tribal hunting equipment and objects from the proto-historic phase of the region. The Centre also has three absolutely fantastic fantasy rooms painted in the Khovar style, but with all the basic amenities, to let. The prices are a very reasonable 250 per person for bed and breakfast. Meals cost extra. Bulu is a great raconteur and is quite happy to tell you wonderful tales of the region in his inimitable style. Except when he is busy with what matters most to him finding a way to save this priceless heritage. Appealing to the powers that be. Aware, that an appeal he sent in 1993 lay unopened in 2003, the file had not even left the Delhi office. That 30 villages have vanished in the last 8 years, and 14 more were lost, in the Maghad Mines, recently. A whole 200 more villages are slated to be destroyed, without as much as a by your leave from anyone.

Before daybreak and late into the night, you can hear the symphonies play; as he pours over books, statements, letters, papers scattered on the dining table, while he sorts fact from fiction. And produces yet another document, request, appeal to someone worlds away, before it is too late. Knowing he must make the difference. And what is more, believing he can. Even while others lie dreaming, he perseveres. Lone crusader, with a 40-watt bulb in the darkness. We bring you, Bulu Imam, in conversation with Rachana Rana Bhattacharya.

You have been crusading to save the Tribal Art Heritage of India. How would you define the term, Tribal Art?
A century back, the Victorian temperament recoiled against these mud and dung tributes to human imagination. Today the world has changed and these art forms are very much admired in the new anti-materialistic wave sweeping over the avant-garde circles of art and life. Therefore, we return, not surprisingly to the tree, the mother, and to life. These are expressed in a variety of vibrant, eternal symbols, not only subtle, but which also act as parent forms of our ideas and abstractions. As the collective memory of our race.

Why do you feel that preserving the tribal idiom is so vital to us as a people?
Today, after centuries of its abuse, the question of Tribal Art returns to us in a new Avtar. To give new draughts of inspiration to the failing genius of contemporary Indian artists caught between the bright abstractions of a foreign cultural civilisation on one hand, and on the other, the dying memory of revered artistic traditions of our own root culture. I believe, that a deeper study of the varied Indian Tribal Artforms in their living context, linked with the beautiful mystical illustrations of our rock paintings in the coves and crannies of the jungle in which the soul of India was born will bring forth a genuine renaissance in the flagging spirit of Indian art, which has been long overdue.

Why do you feel this site is of such importance?
India has a long history of neglect of its treasure by the responsible authorities. The irretrievable treasure of the Classic Pleistocene in the Narmada Valley now sunk under dams, or of the birthplace of Ramapithecus in the Sutlej Valley under the Govindsagar dam, or the tribal obliteration of Rarhian culture and palaeo-archaeology in the Lower Damodar Valley are instances that instantly spring to mind. Let us not forget that this region is culturally and archaeologically, one of the very richest in the whole of India. A region in which, both Jainism and Buddhism were born, and Brahmanism and Islam developed themselves. The former since Upanishadic times and the latter since the 12th Century AD.

Can you give us some examples?
Patkum, which adjoins the important Jain site of Pabanpur in Manbhum Pargana, dates back to Vikramadityas reign. The entire region, was drowned in Subarnarekha and the Chandil Dam which destroyed eighty four villages, their attendant relics and many important Jain heritage sites. All of it is now gone. Forever. To add insult to injury, The Irrigation Department has constructed a museum at Patkum, on a knoll near the dam, where a mere handful of relics (a hundred and fifty large and small statues of Jain Tirthankaras, doors and arches), which a concerned group managed to salvage, are displayed. It is reported that some pieces were taken to the Tribal Research Institute in Ranchi. Who knows what happened to the rest?

When and why do you think all this reckless destruction initially begin?
There has been a visible attempt to suppress an make extinct the living ex-pressions of Tribal Culture which has been even more damning because it was supported by an openly anti-tribal agenda. Even the generosity of embracing the Harijan was at the cost of him having to give up his identity. Ethnology refused to document the tribal folksongs until Verrier Elwin arrived and documented the folk songs of the Maaikal Hills in 1944, and I believe a serious appraisal of tribal art in India is yet to begin in earnest. Ever since the abolition of the Zamindari system in 1950 and the formation of the State Forest Departments in the same year, the mad scramble to reap revenue by destroying the forests, extract minerals and ores began. Archaeological monuments were treated with indifference and the decades of the mindless destruction of our rich cultural heritage by vastly destructive developmental projects and those who knew no better, began. And is progressively getting worse.

Is it just the dams or the mining projects too?
The mining? The less said the better! The biggest open-cast mine in Asia, the Rajmahal Coal Mining Project of the Eastern Coalfields, in the Sahibgunj, Godda and Pakur districts covering 3,200sq.kms have already destoyed the local archaeological remains which were of great value. In the coal mining of the Lower Damodar Valley in Manbhum, a great heritage of Jain monuments, too numerous to mention (it simply horrrrrrrrrrifies me!) were destroyed. There are records that prove this. And in the Upper Damodar Valley? The North Karanpura Coalfields Project envisages the largest (and naturally the most destructive) coal exploration in Asia. Several mines have already started. Two surep thermal power stations and two large dams are to be built, work on the first having begun.

What kind of impact do you envisage these as having on the environment, people and cultural heritage of the region?
Over two hundred villages of unique cultural heritage will be destroyed along with antiquarian and palaeo-archaeological remains, Buddhist, Jain and Hindu sites, megalithic sites, and a flourishing environment of forests, food trees and rich agricultural lands. The tribal peoples inhabiting the area still practice their ritual mural art Khovar and Sohrai, which is in the continuing tradition of the pre-historic rock art of the region, nowhere else to be found. This is the only region on earth where these art forms, now famous and prized by serious Art Collectors the world over, exist.

You mean all of this will be destroyed?
But, naturally, my dear! Not only this, even the wildlife corridors are being destroyed. You see, if there is no path left from your house to mine, how would we meet? It is the same thing with animals. These jungles that are being destroyed so randomly may not be elephant habitat technically, but they are corridors through which animals meet and mate. Without these their numbers will dwindle further, till the endangered species we talk so much about are virtually extinct.

What do you think is the answer?
The answer is quite clear. The region represents a unique living cultural and environmental heritage. We must struggle to save them for posterity as signposts of human life. UNESCO is being appealed to for this. The region will be considered an endangered cultural heritage in the course of time. We have to act while there is still time, before it is too late. Everyone who cares and who can, must come forward and ideate to find solutions. Cause a ruckus! How can we sit back and allow these monkeys to simply jump all over us? And for how long?



CHARKHA FEATURE
LAST UPDATED ON October 2004