Redefining Adivasi Visual Availability: Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book

Abstract

19^th century onward, the Adivasi appeared (and continue to appear) to the colonial and postcolonial gaze on pre-determined terms. In Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894 and 1896), Gond tribals around the Seoni Hills are presented as grotesque vestigial elements of the forest. In Verrier Elwin’s anthropology, Gonds appear as victims of a fond primitivism. In the oeuvre of the Bengal School painters, Santhal tribal bodies are strategized for nationalist swadeshi purposes. However, there is resistance to be found in contemporary representation. I examine the possibilities of one such intervention in the contemporary Anglophone picturebook. In contrast to Kipling and Elwin, The London Jungle Book (2004), a picturebook illustrated by noted Gond visual artist Bhajju Shyam and published by Chennai-based Tara Books, reverses the colonial gaze. Bhajju Shyam stayed in London for two months for mural work and published his experiences in The London Jungle Book upon his return. The text includes his words and his art rendered in the familiar Gond style. Shyam is a Pardhan, a traditional singer storyteller of the Gonds. Pardhans moved from village to village blessing hosts and narrating genealogy and myths. Gond Pardhan artists have turned to visual art since the 1980s and have illustrated catalogues, children’s magazines, and picturebooks in addition to murals, canvases; and have taken up techniques like silkscreen printing. It is appropriate that a Pardhan storyteller of the Gonds visually innovates as he tells another story of London in The London Jungle Book. Instead of the British administrator or traveler parsing Gond bodies, the Adivasi artist travels to London and renders the colonial metropole pliable to his vision of the world. I argue that Bhajju Shyam strategizes the picturebook as well as his visual tradition to reverse a story of unilinear expansion. His art shatters the uniformity of London into multiple stories. He unearths power and a sovereign claim for Adivasis in contemporary India.