Adivasis and Artisanal Production: Pardhan Gonds of Mandla District, Central India, circa 1866-2001 Open Access
Dube, Pankhuree R. (2017)
Abstract
Over the last 25 years the Pardhan Gonds of Mandla District in Madhya Pradesh, central India have acquired enormous acclaim in the global art market for their paintings, sculptures and drawings. The Pardhan Gonds are one of India's adivasi communities--literally, indigenous communities. This dissertation begins with the proposition that contemporary Pardhan Gond art is a form of indigenous knowledge production that can be traced back to historical transformations in the late 19th through 20th centuries. As a form of indigenous knowledge production, Pardhan Gond art recalls the modes of transmission and borrowing of techniques that characterize the work of unlettered artisans. I suggest that a history of these indigenous artisans sheds light on certain processes of "localization." Instead of treating the local as a self-evident spatial or scalar category, I recognize that localization is a historical process within which certain subaltern subjects are reduced to empirical categories. Colonial observers treated the Gonds as people outside the mainstream of historical time. Despite evidence that Gond society was undergoing tumultuous change, colonial, and later nationalist, observers stressed the static quality of Gond culture. And indigenous knowledge production that demonstrated the adaptation, creativity and mobility of the Gond community was treated as a criminal practice that must be checked. Inevitably in this framework, Pardhan Gond artisanal production was a local indigenous knowledge whereas colonial and nationalist elites presumed to speak from a supposedly universal, theoretical and philosophical position.
As my research demonstrates, Pardhan Gond artisans were also peasant-cultivators and bards. Structures of labor organization shifted from the itinerant bard to the settled agriculturist. The artisanal commodities changed from metal implements to gold to, most recently, paintings. This history of adaptation refutes the premise of timeless cultural traditions and challenges the romanticized ethnology of isolated tribes oblivious to major historical events. Instead, we find that Pardhan Gond artisans influenced and were influenced by a range of contemporary forces as they navigated the changing space of regional fairs and migrated to places near and far.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
List of Images
List of Archive Abbreviations
Introduction .1.
Ch. 1: The Colonial Construction of the ‘Primitive' Gonds, .23.
1795-1866
Ch. 2: Colonial Museums as Technologies of .75.
Localization, circa 1857-1930s
Ch. 3: The Adivasi Artisan Speaks Back: .119.
Caste-Passing and Resistance at Melas, 1870s-1930s
Ch. 4: Swadeshi Construction of Adivasi Artisanry: .175.
The Refusal of Gond Aesthetics and Gender, 1890s-1930s
Ch. 5: The Shift from Artisanry to Folk Culture, 1930s-1960s .222.
Ch. 6: From Artisan to Artist: Museology, Object .281.
Formation, and Bharat Bhavan, 1964-2001
Conclusion .315.
Appendix I. .321.
Bibliography .323.
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