Pardhan-Gond artist Mayank Shyam is known for taking the visual language of Jangarh Kalam in unexpected directions. In Three Spaces at Ojas Art Gallery, Delhi, he turns away from the forests, animals, and birds that have long populated Gond art to explore another elemental presence: water. Fish glide across his canvases, waves ripple through compositions, and aquatic forms become carriers of an ancient cosmological story—the birth of the earth. “I don’t want to represent water as water. In my imagination, water takes the shape of fish,” he says.
Using acrylic and ink on paper and canvas, Shyam moves through the three realms of Gond cosmology—the netherworld, earth and sky. The works retain the unmistakable pulse of Gond visual language: intricate repetitions, clusters of dots, rhythmic lines and organic patterns in earthy oranges, deep indigos and greens. It is a vocabulary first pushed into new territory by Shyam’s late father, Jangarh Singh Shyam, the pioneering artist after whom Jangarh Kalam is named.
Shyam resists the reductive labels of “tribal” or “folk art” for his work, insisting that the form is better understood through the name of its pioneer. Unlike hereditary art traditions passed down through generations, Jangarh Kalam emerged when his father began making art; the Pardhans of the Gond community had no established tradition of fine art before him. “Jangarh Kalam is not a traditional hereditary artform, but a contemporary one established by my father. The essence of his work is still evident in that of present-day Gond artists,” he says.
That distinction, for Shyam, is important because it leaves the form open-ended. Without the rigidity of a hereditary tradition, Jangarh Kalam can absorb new influences, imaginations and individual styles. For Shyam, carrying the form forward does not mean faithfully reproducing what came before; it means finding his own visual language within it. His father’s advice remains the simplest manifesto: “Don’t copy my style, build your own identity.”