‘We paint stories we heard from our ancestors’: Intangible heritage of the Pardhan Gonds of Central India

For more than a decade now, the art markets in India and abroad are taking keen interest in artworks made by ‘Adivasi’ or ‘Indigenous’ artists from India. The Gonds are one of the largest Adivasi groups in India, one of the over seven hundred ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in the Indian constitution, a category that affirms their histories of displacement, dispossession and cultural marginalisation. In precolonial times, the Pardhan Gonds of central India served as itinerant bards and genealogists for their patrons among the Gond communities. The Pardhan Gonds now paint their oral songs and stories, and these painted artworks are increasingly in demand across diverse audiences in local and global art circles. In this article, I think about the oral stories, songs and decorative wall art patterns as longer histories in which contemporary Gond visual art is situated. Building on my ethnographic research, I propose that these visual and oral expressions speak of proximate relations with the natural environment and are imbued with emotions of reverence and devotion towards the natural world. Thinking of these relations and emotions as the intangible cultural heritage of Gond Adivasis, I ask, how is this knowledge shared, and how are relationships of interdependence with the natural world produced in everyday life? I discuss an oral story about the Narmada River and then the decorative wall and floor art patterns called digna and examine the close relationship between the two. I argue that it is in the repeated telling of stories, and in the patterns and seasonal iterations of digna, that one can see the everyday work of producing enduring relationships with one’s environment. Thinking about oral stories in conjunction with digna also helps understand the crucial point that these relationships with the natural environment are not motivated by sensibilities of protection and preservation, but imagine interactive and respectful relations with features and materials in the environment. Spiritual and devotional relations coexist with necessary routine interactions and utilitarian relations. This intimate and embodied knowledge that generates creative coexistence with the more than human environment is a valuable intangible heritage, not just for Gond people but for everyone concerned with sustainable human lives on this planet