Kala Ashram in Adilabad recently celebrated Ravindra Sharma's 'sasthipurthi', 6oth birthday, and honoured some of the folk artists and craftspersons with whom he has been closely involved for most of his life. The 3 day event was an aesthetic feast, and there should be some photographs posted soon on internet.
Here are a couple of paragraphs from an article about him:
Here are a couple of paragraphs from an article about him:
The
diversity of the historical folk culture of Adilabad, with its different roles
and relationships is unimaginable to our modernized, sanitized and homogenized
minds. Besides the forest dwelling
adivasi and the cultivators there are the artists, the entertainers, the story
tellers, bards and musicians, the magicians, healers, priests, and scholars,
the makers, weavers of cotton and wool and tassar, stonemasons, potters,
carvers of wooden deities, metalsmiths and brass casters, toy-makers, bamboo
specialists, toddy tappers, oil pressers, the service jatis[1],
the herders of cows and sheep, those who travel for most of the year but who
have a home here nonetheless, and the nomads, passing through on annual
migrations. The various strands of these
peoples’ ways, customs and occupations are at the same time distinctly separate
and yet intimately connected with each other, forming an intricate tapestry of
local society and tradition.
We
spent hours and days listening to Sharmaji[also known as Guruji]'s recreation of the past. The village day was defined by the visits of
the sanchar jatis, the itinerants, beginning before daybreak with the
budubudukalodu, whose songs drove away evil spirits, the balasantodu with conch
and bell, and the gosamolu, a huband and wife playing an ektara. There were people with skills such as water
divining, general entertainers and educators, and story-tellers of particular
communities, the bhikshavruthi, who were each attached to a specific jati the
as oral historians for that jati, and were supported by their patrons. Each community, the weavers, the potters, the
Manevarlu, the Golla shepherds, has its own story-tellers who trace the history
of the jati back to link it up to Puranic times, and each story is told with
the help of a patt, and sometimes also with separate painted wooden
figures. These histories connect the
past to the present in a continuous thread.
The weaving caste of the Padmasalis traces its origins through
Markandeya to Bhavanarushi, their deity, clothes maker to the gods. From these beginning the stories are updated
to today, and tell where the current generation of Padmashalis has migrated to,
who has married whom, and the names of the newborn children. This relationship between the story tellers
and the weavers amplifies the role of bhiksha in our samaj, far from the
pattern of dependency and condescension connoted by the words begging and
beggars.
There is mobility too among the samaaj. Weaving is
taken up by the ‘netagani’, ‘non-weavers’, when it pays, dropped in favour of
other work when it is not remunerative.
Guruji’s
involvement with the samaaj in and around Adilabad has been focused on the
jatis who made up the largest part of the samaaj, who took pride in their particular
and specific skills, who had lateral and interdependent relations among
themselves, far from the European picture of a rigid, hierarchic Indian society. Guruji has shared
the lives of many of them, travelling through the forests with parrot-catchers,
attending the ten day wedding celebrations of the Mathurias and the jatras[2] where the metal casting Ohtaris sell their craft. He has learnt
wax wire casting from the Ojhas and taught them how to make larger objects in their own technique. He has taught art in a tribal school for ten
years, teaching Kolam boys the techniques of the artist, first how to draw,
then to paint, and later modeling in
matti, wax-wire brass casting and other local craft techniques to express their
own unique inner world.
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