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How have the art market and cultural institutions historically engaged with Indigenous art in India and the rest of the world?What challenges do contemporary Indigenous artists face, due to their unique position in an art world which valorises individual talent, while also exoticising traditional practices?

Indigenous art has been poorly contextualised and often misunderstood in the Indian and global mainstream for much of recent history. While impediments to public understanding of Indigenous art began with colonial rule in the eighteenth century, they have continued and evolved into present-day forms as well. This essay seeks to inform the contemporary viewer of questions they need to consider when looking at the work of Indigenous artists today, namely, the effects of the Indian colonial hangover and the position of contemporary Indigenous artists caught between differing ideas of tradition and individuality.

Terms and categories like ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Tribes’ have been coined in the Indian Constitution to confer special rights upon certain marginalised or vulnerable communities in the country. The Indian Penal Code, which has historically been crafted to be flexible and minutely tailored to the varied communities to which it is applied, has invoked these terms in this spirit. This essay will avoid certain terms to describe Indigenous groups, such as “primitive” and “tribe” or “tribal”. While from a purely linguistic perspective, the term “tribe” is a fairly innocent term, its application to Indigenous communities comes with the implication of such groups being rudimentary and regressive social units.

When discussing Indigenous or folk art in India, the term Adivasi is perhaps most representative as it reflects a key concept in the discourse around Indigenous societies, namely, the nuanced distinction between the original inhabitants of a land (from the Sanskrit adi, meaning ancient times, and vasi meaning inhabitants) and the settlers. The term dates back to events at Chotanagpur in the 1930s, when political activists demanded the creation of the new state of Jharkhand, but in more recent years, the word has sometimes been used pejoratively. This idea of indigeneity does not necessarily have to take the literal meaning that applies to “New World” countries but can also be used in the Indian context to forefront an alternative understanding of history and time.

In particular, this latter sense of the term focuses on the adaptive, ever-contemporary nature of Indigenous life and identity. It suggests a way of life external to mainstream concepts of historic progression and distinct from the urban classes founded on feudal and industrialist principles of organisation. Time is fundamental to this difference: the history of Indigenous societies is one of slow, circular evolutions centred around a balanced relationship with the natural world and urban human settlements. On the other hand, urban settlements are the result of societies that have moved irreversibly through history, often undergoing dramatic changes at the cost of larger environmental and cultural systems to which they are subject. Finally, the essay will make frequent reference to the general art market, using terms like “mainstream” or “commercial” art, since nearly all the art in these markets is produced, financed and managed by non-Indigenous people in urban areas.

Since the colonisation of India, and particularly since industrialisation, Adivasi communities have had a difficult relationship with industrialised urban Indian society. Apart from the socio-political tensions between Indigenous people and the expansionist projects of nation-building, the art produced by these communities has long been viewed with condescension or seen as “exotic” by mainstream art enthusiasts, often despite good intentions. Bearing in mind the subordinate position ascribed to Indigenous art compared to mainstream Western or West-influenced art — or what is known as “fine art” — this essay will make little distinction between art and what is thought of as “craft” when discussing Indigenous art practitioners. Although the essay will draw global parallels wherever relevant, the focus will largely remain on Indigenous art in the Indian context.

The colonial impact on Indigenous art and its lasting effects

In regions with significant Indigenous populations, such as Australia and sub-Saharan Africa, colonial powers have fetishised and appropriated narratives around Indigenous art and culture, especially since the nineteenth century. Art objects made in the context of Indigenous, non-urban cultures that caught the interest of colonial officers in various parts of the world — for instance, brass statues from Benin or ritual masks from other parts of Africa — were taken as curios to become part of collections in the West. At best, this fascination can be seen as a testament to how alien one form of society may seem to another and at worst, a means to vilify Indigenous cultures. As a result of the vast differences between the original Indigenous context and the European societies in which these artefacts were studied, they were frequently misunderstood and misrepresented to the public.

Mbangu (illness) Mask. Courtesy Royal Museum for Central Africa and Wikimedia Commons

Curio dealers such as Tost and Rohu Taxidermists, Tanners, Furriers and Island Curio Dealers, now known as the Tyrells Museum in Sydney, operated as middlemen who obtained Indigenous artefacts and sold them to private collectors and institutions. These objects, originally possessing ritual or utilitarian value in aboriginal culture, became trinkets and ornaments.

In the Americas, shrunken heads made by the Jivaroan people of the Amazon rainforest were commodified and imitated for the revenue they brought to curio shops in the US and Britain, altering cultural practices and belief systems by making Jivaroan headhunters a part of a global supply chain for the newly aestheticised objects. This also gave rise to incorrect conclusions about a community’s cultural values as seen through the lens of Victorian morality, which in turn bolstered, unsurprisingly, the frequent claim that colonisation was a necessary civilising mission.

Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba; Edo people; c. 16th century; Ivory, iron, copper. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Prior to colonisation in the Indian subcontinent, and particularly in the medieval period, Brahmin appropriation of Adivasi deities and customs was used as a tool by which entire cultures were brought into the fold of Hinduism. A major example of this is the god Jagannath, who, according to scholars, was worshipped as Kittung by the Saora people of Odisha. Around the twelfth century, the kingdom’s increasingly influential Brahmin priesthood declared Kittung to be an avatar of Vishnu. Like other important Hindu deities, Vishnu was said to have many forms, each of which became part of Hindu — more specifically, Vedic or Brahmin — mythology over time. Non-Hindu deities like Kittung were added to the Vedic pantheon while the caste system was used to regulate the newly indoctrinated Indigenous community, as evidenced by the Sanskritisation (i.e., brought into the Vedic canon) of the Saora priests. Where the goal of pre-colonial appropriation of Indigenous cultures in South Asia was integration into the caste system,........

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