Every Gond painting sold today, whether it shows a tiger stalking through dotted foliage or a peacock rendered in fine parallel lines, traces back to one artist who moved the tradition off village walls and onto paper for the first time. Jangarh Singh Shyam did not inherit a painting style. He built one, and it carried his name: Jangarh Kalam.
A Village Artist in Patangarh
Jangarh Singh Shyam was born around 1960 in Patangarh, a small village in what was then Mandla district and is now part of Dindori district, Madhya Pradesh. He belonged to the Pardhan Gond community, whose traditional role within Gond society was that of bards and genealogists, keeping the clan’s oral history and stories alive through song.
Painting, in Patangarh, meant something specific: bhittichitra, the practice of decorating the mud walls of a home with images of animals, plants and trees drawn from the forest around it. Jangarh grew up inside that tradition, with no formal art training beyond it.
Discovered by Bharat Bhavan
In 1981, researchers working for J. Swaminathan, the founding director of Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, were travelling through rural Madhya Pradesh looking for tribal and folk artists for the new arts centre. They found Jangarh, then still a teenager, painting in Patangarh and brought him to Bhopal to work alongside Swaminathan.
It was an unusual invitation. Bharat Bhavan was built to put tribal, folk and contemporary art in the same institutional space, treating them as equally serious practices rather than ranking one above the other. Jangarh’s move there gave him access to paper, canvas, poster paint and later acrylics, materials no one in Patangarh had painted with before.
From Mud Walls to Paper: The Birth of Jangarh Kalam
Working on canvas changed what Jangarh’s painting could do without changing what it was about. He kept the subjects of bhittichitra and digna, the geometric patterning Gond women apply to walls and floors, and kept the dense fields of dots and fine lines that fill every figure. What changed was scale, colour range and permanence: a wall painting fades with the next rains, a canvas does not.
The result became known as Jangarh Kalam, Jangarh’s style. His paintings are built around the deities of Gond belief, among them Thakur Dev and Bada Dev, alongside the animals of the forest: tigers, peacocks, snakes and birds, each filled with the same patterning that once covered a village wall. Other artists who trained around him adopted the same visual language, and Jangarh Kalam is still the basis of most Gond painting sold today, including the pieces in this collection.
Recognition at Home and Abroad
Jangarh’s work was recognised early. In 1986, he received the Shikhar Samman, one of Madhya Pradesh’s state art honours, for his contribution to Indian art.
The turning point for Gond painting as a whole came in 1989, when Jangarh’s work was shown at “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a landmark exhibition that placed contemporary artists from outside Europe and North America alongside Western contemporary art on equal terms. The same year, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum acquired five of his ink drawings, a set of bird and animal studies that remain in the museum’s permanent collection today.
Seven years later, in 1996, Jangarh painted a mural covering roughly 6,500 square feet on the exterior of Vidhan Bhavan, Madhya Pradesh’s state legislature building in Bhopal, a public commission on a scale no Gond artist had been given before.
That recognition hasn’t faded with time. In September 2026, two of his 1999 canvases set back-to-back auction records within five days: Bel Mukhota (Gond) sold for ₹2.88 crore at Saffronart, then an untitled canvas showing a spiritual figure surrounded by snakes and birds in a tree sold for ₹18 crore at Pundole in Mumbai — a new record for the artist, against a pre-sale estimate of just ₹4-6 crore, for a work that had never appeared at auction before.
A Family and a Movement
Jangarh did not practise alone. His wife, Nankusia Shyam, began by colouring his drawings and went on to build her own body of work, exhibiting in Dubai, Japan and Sri Lanka and receiving a state-level award from the Madhya Pradesh Hasta Shilpa Vikas Nigam in 2002. Two of their children, Japani and Mayank, are Gond artists in their own right, and their home in Bhopal has long served as a gathering point for artists travelling from Patangarh.
The next generation reached further still. Jangarh’s nephew, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, trained under him in Bhopal before developing his own, more abstract direction within the same dot-and-line technique. Bhajju Shyam, Jangarh’s uncle by relation and a fellow Patangarh-born Pardhan Gond artist, became known internationally for The London Jungle Book. Durga Bai Vyam, who learned digna from her mother, was encouraged by Jangarh himself to begin exhibiting her own work. All three carry Jangarh Kalam forward today, as does every artist whose Gond painting you’ll find in this collection.
Read more about the tradition Jangarh founded in our guide to Gond art, or browse our collection of authentic, artist-attributed Gond paintings.