TRIBAL ART USED TO DEPICT THE LIFE OF BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR

Gond artists find a new canvas in graphic novels

Gond artist Subhash Vyam says his wife has now made friends with young people across the country. “Everywhere we go, people have so many questions for her and want to take her shopping,” he says, teasing Durga Bai.


The two artists from Bhopal have been travelling across the country promoting their graphic novel ‘Bhimayana’ on the life of BR Ambedkar published by Navayana.

In Chennai to meet students on Thursday, the couple talked about adapting their traditional art form to the modern graphic novel. “When the publisher first gave us this idea and showed us graphic novels,

we were horrified. The drawings were all in boxes,” says Durga. “We told him we cannot draw in boxes as art should be free,” she says.

Traditionally, the Gonds, a tribe from central India, paint on the mud walls and floors of their homes with o r g a n i c colours, but over the

past 40 years they’ve adopted canvas, paper and acrylic paint to sell their art commercially. They illustrate ideas, concepts and stories from their village rather than narrate tales sequentially.

“I told them stories of Ambedkar hundreds of times as Durga cannot not read and Subhash has only studied to class V,” says S Anand, publisher, Navayana. “I was determined to have them do the book because they have fantastic imagination and could tell the story in a new way.”

And the couple did come up with a completely novel method — they replaced boxes with the ‘digna’ or decorative borders and patterns that the Gonds adorn their homes with. “The ‘digna’ just divides the space on the page without restricting the art,” explains Subhash. “Working on this book was a challenge and made us think beyond our traditional ways of illustration,” he says. The artists will also talk about their art at Spaces on Elliots’ Beach Road in Besant Nagar on Friday at 6pm.

“Until we worked on this, we didn’t realise there were so many ways of telling a story,” says Durga, whose illustrations for children’s books have won international awards. Subhash agrees, saying, “I always thought the words told the story in a book and pictures just added to them. It took us three years to do this graphic novel but I’m happy with it.”

In India, graphic novels have been published only in the last five or six years, though internationally, some like ‘Palestine’ by Joe Sacco and ‘Maus’ (on the Holocaust) by Art Spiegelman enjoy cult status. The form is still evolving here but themes are varied, ranging from conflict in Kashmir and corruption to life in a metro and the history of Hyderabad, as writers and artists use pictures to tell stories.

“The graphic telling of stories is not new, yet it is fresh,” Jasraman Grewal, co-author of the Hyderabad Graphic Novel Project, a comic-book look at the Deccani city’s history that is still on the drawing board. “Words can be limiting while writing certain things. A graphic novel is brilliant because it gives factual history without the need of arguments and flowery descriptions,” he says. “To show a history of a city or person through a graphic novel may one day change how textbooks are written or taught. Who knows?”

Anand too is hoping that ‘Bhimayana’ will one day be picked up by the government and used as a textbook. “The idea is to take the story to the world. I want Ambedkar’s struggle to be known everywhere just as people know of Mandela, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks,” he says. Source: The Times of India dated 05.02.2011

A STORY TOLD: Gond artists Subhash Vyam and Durga Bai during an interaction with students in Chennai on Friday