Sudarshan Shaw, artist, change-maker and conservationist, is a link between our past and our present. He exemplifies Sanctuary’s belief that it is the artists, poets, philosophers, singers, dancers, performers, mothers and children that will lead us away from the dangerous fork we have so unthinkingly chosen to take in our quest to reach the mirage of #EconomicNirvana, which has begun to change our relationship with the biosphere that birthed us.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Virtually everyone knows you from your work, but could we get a glimpse of the man behind his passion for art?
Well, I was born in Odisha’s Bhubaneswar – a city of rich cultural and artistic heritage. My father runs a small agro products business and my mother does the most important job in the world. She is a home-maker. Long summer and Puja vacations at my maternal home in Kolkata opened windows to a city brimming with art and creativity. Much of my childhood was spent in a large joint family comprising about 20 members, each with diverse sets of skills and interests. So many people shaped me. I recall, for instance, getting so many different kinds of answers from family members to the very same question! I owe my love for art to my two cradle cities and my perpetual hunger to digest the diversity of knowledge embodied in my relationships with members of my wonderfully diverse family.
Sudarshan Shaw on a look out for his inspirations and muses in the waters of the Sundarban. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
And your schooling?
I completed my primary education in DAV Public School and my secondary education at Bhubaneshwar’s Buxi Jagabandhu Bidyadhar Autonomous College, more easily referred to as the BJB Junior College. I then joined the National Institute of Fashion Technology, or NIFT, in New Delhi, where I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Design. Of course, I then had absolutely no idea what avenues that degree was going to open for me in the future.
As it turned out, art quite literally took over your life! Did your family support you in this quest?
Yes! Art dominated my childhood years and my parents ensured I was exposed to art-intensive environments, wherever they could be found. Bhubaneswar has a reverence for art, music and dance! A child’s inclination towards art in the city was a thing of pride. More so for my family since my grandfather, who passed away at a young age, was a brilliant performing stage artist who loved to sketch. I’m told he would also write letters for people after translating them into English! So, yes, I was overwhelmingly supported by my family, in walking the sacred path of art! I still recall childhood visits to ancient temples and being asked to observe and later reproduce the fascinating forms and engravings on the walls. And, while most art teachers monitored techniques and fluency, I was lucky to find one who taught me that art was a celebration, and the peak of freedom of expression. While words are bound in rigid notions, one can always strike an absolutely new combination of lines and colours!
FolkIndica artwork illustrating the on-going conservation efforts to protect the glorious gharials of Odisha. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
What a journey! Good teachers are gifts for young minds.
Indeed! I can see so many dots connecting my path, as I walk down memory lane. I vividly remember two very bright days when I can say art draped its cast over me. A very sick 12-year-old me chanced a glance upon a Kali visarjan (submersion in water) procession through a small window of a traditional house in Cuttack. Something transpired within me at that moment, which I still cannot adequately describe. I hastily asked for pen and paper and drew what I saw as powerful visual art... a sculpture that exuded magnificent energy that dwarfed all else. That moment changed my life. I am still filled with the undying love of art that pervaded my being and gifted me the power to tell stories through art.
Another ‘bright day’ was responsible for ‘wildlife art’ taking over my life. It was my first ever visit to a wildlife reserve, while I was in my fourth year of design college. Ranthambhore took charge of my mind and heart. On that trip I felt the same energy of magnificence for the second time. I knew a mere handful of birds and mammals by their names, only the most common ones, and yet I remembered each of my sightings in vivid detail. But, I confess that (unlike with Kali), I struggled to connect with what I saw. It was only when I interacted with the locals, an array of stories filled my being. Anecdotes caught in the age-old native art practices and the history fossilised in the traditional crafts translated the foreign forest into a fondly familiar place in no time. This is where the seeds of ‘FolkIndica’ were sown.
And what exactly is Folk Indica?
Let me try to put this simply – ‘westernisque’ aesthetics and visual treatments for native stories of India are what a plastic lunch box might be to a traditional lunch, or a suit and tie attire are to a largely tropical nation! As an artist, I felt the need to reclaim India’s long lost pride in its own visual language and art among other things, to begin with. In my search for a native visual language that could speak fairly of India’s land and native beings, I found infinite learnings in the visualisations of diverse folk art forms, traditional art practices, the subtlety of historical sculptures and colours of co-existing cultural diversity.
FolkIndica, my unique, personal art style, was born at this wild intersection. While I intend to apply FolkIndica to as many spheres of visual communication as possible, I believe that when it comes to science and conservation communication, we must also listen and speak to communities that are most proximate to wildlife… far from modern graphic languages. Put another way, FolkIndica’s blend of local roots and global outlook seeks to communicate with India’s masses, while simultaneously offering a fair representation at a global level. The ‘tough’ part, the real challenge, comes when one faces a fast-paced society that, with every passing day, tends to devalue/undervalue the abiding power of art.
‘Hornbill and the fig’ and ‘Vulture and the dead’ – artworks from ‘My Picture of Divinity’ series celebrating unique relationships between beings in the wild. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
What is your muse? What truly inspires you and keeps you going?
One of my many muses is ‘History’. It has a transportive quality that most triggers my imagination. I also scour through all manner of news. Even at a very young age, I could not imagine a new day without a fresh newspaper to pour through! For every new ‘finding’, I trail down its past, in the sure belief that the same route leads to its future. All trends seem to follow a helical pattern. With history, wonder multiplies manifold and the infiniteness of information leaves one humbled. It is my love for history that makes me want my works to look visually dated, and not modern!
You said one of your many muses?
Apart from history, I find myself enwrapped by birds. I remember spotting a particularly colourful bird from my window in my early childhood, only to have me drawn to a magical world of wings and feathers for the rest of my life. I realised recently that the bird was a White-throated Kingfisher, which now colonises our cites, but was then a rare sight. While I only gazed at birds for most of my youth, that trip to Ranthambhore flipped a switch in me, and I began to seek those living close to wild nature purposefully.
I also believe that avians connect our alienated urban world to the wild. Birds bring life from faraway forests into our existence in the form of seeds, and for those who have the sensitivity, they transport their ‘followers’ by reminding them of the beautiful secrets of high and deep forests.
Biodiversity map of Arunachal Pradesh illustrating its biological and cultural treasures. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
Switching track a bit, tell us how you source your references? Does this take up a lot of time before you actually get down to crafting your work?
Sourcing stories and references is the most exciting part, so much so that I find the biggest challenge in deciding where to stop with this. It is a dense forest with no marked tracks, and the bird of curiosity hops from one tree to another, never resting to offer a perfect still (the final vision of the artwork) for her seeker. Two more old friends who guide along are ‘observation’ and ‘patience’.
Fascinating! Do you also frequent the forests where your muses originate?
Field trips are way more helpful than secondary research. First hand experience of landscapes inspires my choice of colours. Such visits also help situate where exactly in the territory of time the subject should live. Accounts of interactions with the wild, beliefs and practices narrated by native communities, markings, paintings, songs and folklore impact perception and dictate my forms and patterns. Attaching beliefs such as animism, sacredness or fear from animals alter their contextual size in my artworks. I have learnt that tigers from lands of different topography, history and culture look entirely different! The tigers of Ranthambhore have a royal demeanour, while those of the Sundarban are perceived as ferocious! Apart from this, I personally associate a meditative character with most wild species, and that underlines all my works. Hornbills in my art would seem to wait as long as the observer wants to observe them, you see.
I also look towards folk art clusters and works of artists at craft museums, spending a lot of time understanding just how a line should curve to make an antelope’s stance as tender as it is strong. At this point I’d like to express immense gratitude to the spectacular body of work that Rohan Chakravarty (Green Humour) has put up for wildlife artists for generations to come! His work is the simplest and quickest visual dictionary for spot-on features, expressions and colours that make… say a sketch of a Malabar Trogon, a Malabar Trogon!
Mud painting of the elusive baghrol (fishing cat), inspired by the folk art of Kalighat. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
How deeply involved are you with the nuances of biodiversity conservation in India?
While I read up as much as I can (from conservation organisations and fora), I must say, situations on-ground often, if not always, present different realities. My field visits throw up a diverse range of stories, helping me develop an open-minded approach towards conservation. I have also been digging deep into the wildlife history of India, through old records, paintings commissioned in colonial times, and the mysterious occurrence of unlikely species in age-old folk depictions and sculptures from different parts of the country – all painting a fiercely wild and thriving pre-colonial India! Tracking their demise and hunting down explanations for the current state of affairs becomes irresistible.
Briefs that I get from my clients, largely forest departments and NGOs, also help me analyse the focus, understanding and actions that lead to biodiversity conservation in India. Birding has also helped me travel through the timelines of biodiversity conservation. Changing behaviour, migratory routes and disappearances of tiny birds have led to bigger revelations in the changing landscape of India.
When a Forest Wakes Up’ – a children’s book inspired by animism, written and illustrated by Sudarshan for Pratham Books. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
Clearly your images are a blend of nature and human cultures, both urban and rural. Do you see an end to the conflict we see between the two today?
My attempts to bring nature and human cultures together in almost all of my artworks draws its inspiration from a past when humans lived more closely with wild creatures that actually shaped Indigenous cultures. Several fables and rituals of interactions and relationships between humans and wildlife still exist, but are rapidly fading, though they are alive in forest fringes. Today their documentation in folk art and traditional art practices are imagined as fiction plots! Long before the colonial separation between wild habitats and human settlements, there must surely have been attitudes and practices that promoted a thriving co-existence.So… I make it a point to bring nature and human cultures together in my artworks. As much to represent reality as to cut down the distances I see building between the two today, as we perceive watching wildlife in isolation, as untouched and pristine. While an end to the conflict between hyper-interdependent nature and a hyper-individualistic contemporary culture is wide, I do see hope in bringing to light other ways of looking at community-living and wildlife, which were and are still practised in Indigenous cultures.
‘Nine birds’ – imagined in nine different folk art styles of India, celebrating the country as a nation, where birds of different feathers flock together. Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
Our interaction has already been quite a ride. Tell me, are you a pessimist or an optimist? Particularly as we face the twin threats to India from the loss of biodiversity and galloping climate change...
Hope fills me every time I hear an old man from an Indigenous community talk about the traits of even the smallest leaves in the forests. Life is instilled as part of their animistic beliefs in each and every stone. When they talk about wild animals, they refer to them as one among them and consequently address their needs and behaviour with empathy. But there are times when I lose hope, as I watch colonial pine forests that have, and still continue to replace, native oaks and deodars, thus degrading the fragile ecosystems of the Himalaya. When I see paintings of the indiscriminate hunting of wildlife in 19th Century India and interact with tribal communities forced from the forests that were home to them for centuries in the name of conservation, pain and sadness overtakes me. I see now how newer generations from native communities have started to drift away from their own cultures and traditional wisdom as they grasp for a sense of belonging and identity. I wince when I hear the oversimplification of the complexities of conservation reduced to the mere planting of trees. I could go on, but you can see one overweigh the other even as I recount just a couple of thoughts from the top of my head.
But as an artist, I must not allow myself to choose one jacket, as true art thrives far from names and definitions. With the power to visualise extremes, art must challenge static notions, question answers… and answer questions! I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist, but an artist seeking to take charge, to change. One day, I hope to discover a simple leaf as a logo mark for a hi-tech business agency, not as a way of green-washing, but as a representation of their belief in the truth that all inspiration ultimately emerges from the brilliance of nature. Do you see the kind of forces I am trying to bring together?
Jan Van Chitran is an initiative that seeks to rekindle the wild spirit of youth belonging to tribal communities through the medium of art (its first workshop was conducted with the Sendhwa Forest Division). Photo Courtesy: Sudarshan Shaw.
My word yes! I can feel both your pulse and your pain. One last question. What advice, if any, do you have for young India? Can they rely upon art as a reliable way to earn a living in a world dominated by artificial intelligence?
To young India, I would quote Sir David Attenborough: “There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world, four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.” To that I would add that we must watch out for the magnificent diversity that constitutes our living planet. We never know which one could end up solving the burgeoning threat to our own life on Earth.
My strongest realisation, which I would like to share with the young? “Art and nature bond in a world where words are alien. Both speak in a language only as splendid and clever as their seeker. Both wild, both free! The bigger the room for art grows inside human hearts, the bigger the home for the wild”.
Everything in the world is art to someone or the other. The value to an artwork is set by its audience and not the artist. Mediums have come and mediums have gone, but those who have seen value in the tangibility and fragility of a hand-made art piece, have stuck to paying for it. Those who have associated themselves with the beliefs and quirks of any artist or artists in particular, always look up to them. Those who can see the art for what all it is beyond the artwork itself, would set the value and market for it. And that is why I believe that art and artists can never be in ‘competition’. Those who do not relate may never seek newer works, the choice of art is really about the audience’s mindset, and trends only represent the collective intelligence of the society. I feel AI is the newest medium for art and it would have its own set of artists and appreciators.
