Stories of The Jungle

Between two trees, is the doorway to a whole new world…  – John Muir

The stories we grow up with shape our being. They are integrated into all aspects of our life – bedtime stories, prose, and relived memories. A child’s first interaction with the world is the stories their mother tells, and then the memories of their environment. Dhavat hails from Patangarh, a village surrounded by the forests of Madhya Pradesh. His work captures the forests that surrounded the village and farmland he grew up in – the hierarchy of the animals, the prey and the predator, the nests – with a layer of the folk tales he grew up on. His keen understanding of the forest and the animal shines through in his works.

The tree is revered by the Pardhan Gonds. They see it in the form of their mother, who protects them, or in the form of a goddess, who they worship. The forest is a source of wood, of foraged and hunted food, and of art and prose. The villagers have diverse, enriched memories of the forest; every one of them associates it with the folk tales spun by their mother. The animals are all linked to different stories that the villagers resonate with, but each reminiscent of their childhood tales.

Each artwork reflects on different memories or stories from the woodlands that Dhavat has from his youth and later visits home. The flora, fauna, and vesting villagers in the forest, and their interaction is captured in brilliant detail.

Through the years, Dhavat has played with a monochrome language accented with small bursts of colours in his work. He brings out the beauty of the woodland with monochrome intricate trees and splashes of colour in some of the works to highlight the narrative he weaves when the works come together. The monochrome patterns in the trees speak of the beauty and intricacies of their natural form, each one with great detail yet simple and unique.

The tiger is a subject that has been an intrinsic part of Dhavat’s work through the years. In the work ‘Tiger Sighting’, he talks about the whispers after a tiger sighting in the village, with the amount of damage inflicted and the villager’s escapes compounding in scale and audaciousness! This work contrasts from the themes of the loneliness of the apex predator in the works ‘The Lonely Tiger’ and ‘The Softness of The Tiger’. 

The folklore surrounding the forest is woven into Dhavat’s work. In ‘The Flying Elephant’, he looks at how the elephants lost its wings – their flying bringing havoc to the fields and the animals on the ground leading to the an intervention by the mer-folk. He also looks at unlikely friendships that once existed in the forest – cows and lions taking care of each other after the cow is abandoned in ‘The Cow and The tiger’, and a wild boar fighting a younger tiger after their friendship falls apart in ‘The Tiger and The Wild Boar’. In ‘Rai Bidhani’, he explores the idea of envy, and the simple but strong nature of the relationship between brothers and sisters. 

For Dhavat, these works are also a documentation of the forest as he knows it, not the one we see today and not the one we are heading towards. As the forestry department deforests and reforests in the vicinity, a stark difference between the two becomes visible in the ecosystem- the new trees planted, the number of animals in the forest, and how they interact with the changed environment.

His fear of the changes brought on by this change, and the continuing trend, inspired Dhavat to preserve the memory of the forest he knows and grew up with through his art.

Ragini Jyoti Jain