Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2010

By Raphaël Rousseleau

Introduction
Naga necklaces and tribal bronzes from central India are today well known to collectors. However, outside of these two particular cases, Adivasi art,1 or “Indian tribal art,” remains a vast field with blurred and indefinite borders. The seminal works describing this art were those of author Verrier Elwin in the 1950s. Such Indian artifacts had been collected for their ethnographic and “primitive” interest since the nineteenth century, but Elwin was first to categorize them as “tribal art” based on an African or Oceanic model, and these arts began to be reevaluated from an aesthetic point of view. Subsequently, other individuals and Indian institutions played an important role in the recognition and promotion of these arts. Prominent among these was Pupul Jayakar, Jyotindra Jain, and the Craft Museum of New Delhi. Each of these authors has a different vision of the arts in question, and it is useful to examine them by placing them into a brief history of how these arts have been viewed.