Folk & Tribal Expressions: H.A.Anil Kumar
Benchmark to the challenges in Modernist Perceptions
Folk and Tribal Art (FTA) is a term evoked by the impact of
Museumisation, which is in turn by and large a colonial habit.
When did those ‘preserved’, began to preserve themselves before
being colonized? In other words, the essence of tribal and folk art
does not lie within the ‘objects’ lying on those highly decorative
tables of Delhi Haat or in the exotic-looking ‘Dastakar’ stalls at the
Chitrakala Parishath premise.

Folk and Tribal Art is always imagined ‘against’ or ‘in
comparison’ with Modern and Contemporary art, as though the
comparison is inevitable. Feminism, racism and casteism are
subject to similar discourses, in the sense that they are born
imagining an already existing ‘opposite’. Hence FTA is an idea
about preserving the ‘non-mainstream’ past in a certain ‘current
mainstream’ mode. There is no existence possible to FTA outside
the mainstream. Apologetically museumising a past ‘act’ in the form
of a ‘current object’ is Folk and Tribal Art! Since it is a modernist
habit to have done so, the modernist perception of ‘objectifying’
(read also as ‘economizing’) has been alleged onto FTA as well.
Perhaps the avant -garde of folk and tribal art should logically be
in its act as an end in itself. Thus the white simplistic drawing on
a wall in the name of Warli painting ‘occurs’ only when someone
outside the Warli community (not only) identifies (but also) and
‘objectify’ them as precious. Otherwise, those who actually drew it
might have woven the authoritarian credentials for doing so, with
the wind and sun shine that caressed the drawn wall, day after
day.
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expression refuses to be contained in a static visual, it
naturally refutes a divide in the media which is used to
generally identify them. The urban who looks at the folk
creation watches them like we watch the animals in the
zoo. Watching collaborative projects between the urbanmainstream
artists and the rural folk artists might evoke
similar feelings. Bureaucratic setup has been dictating the
folk artists to perform as a part of the protocol, inviting
the classical artists on to the Dias; but never the other way
round!
The styles of Patua painting, a leather puppet, a
marionette and Kinnala art form might act as identity
marks, but the oral tradition of the folk and tribal
expression is compulsorily the opposite of a ‘style’. They
are improvisations, circulated amidst the common crowd,
which means that they were deliberations to surpass the
absolutist appearances, beyond the authoritarianism of
the feudal and the administrative demands and devices.
Hence folk and tribal art is a twin, not easy to differentiate
one from the other in categorisation, is split into two: the
static stylized visual could in fact be the residue of a oral
narrative which is consistently ever altering (remember the
Pat painters narrating the story, while gradually unveiling
the visuals; or the narrative in the Karnataka leather
puppetry wherein lord Krishna falls in love with Parvathi,
evoking humour instead of a controversy).
In a way, this art form problematise our divide or even
the differentiation between media of expressions like the
oral and the visual, while absenting the written format.
In other words, the folk and tribal visual arts we so much
appreciate as good-craft is in fact the residue of our mistaken
perceptive identity. The good-craft, identified as a static
image, might be a twice dead skin of mortality, according
to them. The leather puppet is made out of a dead sheep or
a goat; and it was posthumously but metaphorically alive
when someone held its articulated-form and narrated from
behind its back-lit avatar, as a performance, for a while.
Modernity gauges the space of a FTA which in fact was
essentially an enactment in time. Most folk and tribal art
are in essence the result of the passage of time, while they
are perceptually documented as capitalist-products.