From Patangarh to Japan: The Gond art that became Jangarh Kalam — and the boy who carried it to the world

On a humid monsoon afternoon in the early 1980s, in a village most Indians had never heard of, a Delhi artist stood silently before a mud wall. The village was Patangarh, deep inside the Mandla forests of Madhya Pradesh. The wall belonged to a modest Gond home. And on that wall, painted in earth pigments and improvised brushes, a teenage boy had created a world that seemed to move – snakes curling into rivers, birds morphing into trees, forest spirits floating above hills, every surface breathing with lines, dots and patterns.

The visitor, painter and thinker J Swaminathan, instantly sensed that this was not “tribal craft” or “folk ornamentation.” It had structure, language, confidence. It was, unmistakably, contemporary art. The boy was named Jangarh Singh Shyam. Within a decade, his w