Choti Tekam: Where Lyrics are Images , the Forest her Palette
Vikas Harish

Choti Tekam was born in a distant Gond village in the Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, where the forest and the villagers were close neighbours. Fields were green and pastures abundant, and the children learnt to live in harmony with nature. In this sheltered life Choti knew only the ways of the village and the forest, the songs of her culture. She imbibed them both as she grew.

Girls in this rural part of India were raised to become housewives, and Choti knew she would one day marry and form her own family. She learnt cooking and cleaning, as well as beautifying her home and courtyard with digna, a form of decorative painting with geometric motifs. Choti remembers the time she used earth colours, or limebased wall washes to create decorations that were non-traditional, much to the consternation of her mother. While the other young girls followed the pattern of creating bold colour bands that ended in angular geometric shapes, Choti was inspired by the beauty of nature around her. Colours gave expression to her dreams and a voice to the songs that were rhythmic to her life.


Choti was very young when she was married to Santosh Tekam, simple man who had moved from the village to the distant city of Bhopal. Bhopal had already become important to budding Gond artists, like Santosh, who began to congregate in Bhopal in the late 1980’s. Santosh belonged to the family of legendary artist Jangarh Singh Shyam, who had established a studio at the Bharat Bhawan.

For a young girl from the village the sleepy city of Bhopal was a perhaps a metropolis. She was in awe, a fear of unfamiliar foreign world. Her life had changed from the abandon of the village to the anonymity of a city. The idyllic life of a young girl, princess of her impoverished home, was now rhythmed in the staccato of the city. A rude awakening for the young couple was that they must earn substantially to permit a dignified and independent life. Choti was forced to work, first as help at homes and then as a daily wager at the Museum of Mankind to help ends meet. This was a difficult time for the couple, though the fiercely independent Choti knew she would only count on herself to change the situation.

The young girl whose daydreams and songs gave her the joy of life was crushed under the weight of her city life. The confines of their small hut were opposite to all that she had lived in her youth in the village.

This was a indeed a peculiar time for the art, on the one hand the centrality of painting for the Gond compelled their desire to create, while on the other the Bharat Bhavan and Museum of Man gained importance as centres of learning in the folk and tribal arts.

Digna painting was a way of decorating their homes and courtyards with designs that distinguish their homes and invite good fortune. When Jangarh Singh Shyam was discovered by the artist Swaminathan, it precipitated a new, wider appreciation of Gond tribal art. The Bharat Bhawan and subsequently the Museum of Man became centres of excellence in the tribal art form and gave an artistic home to many of these budding artists. Painting was a profession that most young tribal men had never considered. It was the realm of women traditionally. However, in the professionalization of the art men came to fore in adopting it as a means of earning a living. However, commissions were scarce, and many of the hopeful artists had to work as gallery guards, daily helps or in other jobs unrelated to making art.