A Brush With Gond Art

Sometimes things turn out way different from what was originally planned and sometimes these plans are better than what was originally envisaged. On 28th April, The Color Caravan along with Eureka Bookstore organized its first workshop ever: a Gond painting workshop for children with Gond artist Mangru Uike at Bumble Bees in New Delhi.

Our initial plan was to introduce the Gond painting workshop with the artist, Mr. Heerman Urweti. We got amazing response from people the moment the event was announced on our Facebook page, with bookings getting over within 2 days of the announcement. This moment was very special to us; we realized that members of The Color Caravan family were actually interested in learning folk art.

But our event hit an impasse in the form of some sad news regarding Heerman’s family. He called to tell us that he would have to miss out the workshop because his badi mummy had passed away. We were saddened by this news because we felt for Heerman and his family. But we were also in a bad place because we didn’t want to cancel our first ever workshop.

And that’s when our good friend, mentor and craft promoter, Minhaaz Majumdar came to our rescue! It was through her we were immediately able to replace Mr. Heerman with one of her Gond artists, Mangru Uike. But before we could give the green signal to our event we had to call up the parents of our young workshop participants to seek permission for the workshop with Mangru Uike and not Heerman as was originally planned. And amazing as our TCC family is, they all agreed to have Mangru Uike lead the workshop for us. So there we had Mangru Uike hopping onto the next train to Delhi to conduct the workshop the next morning itself.

We had about 25 young participants under our hat and what a fun-filled day it was with them! Mangru Uike brought the inner genius out of all our budding artists! Every kid was busy with their pencils and colors, simply drawing away. The kids just let their imagination run amok in those few hours of drawing. And not only that, Mangru made it awesome by showing them how to paint in the Gond mode. Some people initially floundered but eventually picked up the pace thanks to our amazing artist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To deviate from the topic a bit, we are sure that our readers would be interested to know a little bit about the history of Gond art. Essentially, Gond tribal community is one of Madhya Pradesh’s largest indigenous communities whose artistic expression lies in deriving a meaning to life while attempting to record their local history. These drawings are not only based on the local folklore but also are intimately derived from images found in one’s daily life. The community also celebrates nature in its craft which can be seen in their celebration of forests and agriculture. But the predominant theme in these paintings have been that of mythical beasts apart from the detailing that is done through the use of flora and fauna, as Mangru Uike showed us.

In the end, we were enervated, but our creative abilities were never exhausted. The workshop was such a massive success that we are now inspired to conduct many more workshops for our TCC family! A hearty thanks to all those who came!
P.S. A special mention to Shreya Lahumi who was there to support us throughout! :)

(The Color Caravan owns the copyright for all the photographs in this post. Cannot be used in any form without permission.)