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11 Min Read “I must tell you that his beak is not just another yellow, it is the solemn sunset of an old forest; the black is a shadow of one among the hundred ficus trees that a hornbill meticulously farms, and the noisy green is everything in between.”
It’s tough to recover from the sublime—which Edmund Burke called our strongest passion—after you’ve seen Sudarshan Shaw’s surreal depictions of the wild and the beings that populate it. It’s tough to rebelieve that even ordinary things exist. If you do, Shaw’s Owl, wearing ashes of the soot and the crescent of the moon, could materialise in your dreams.
A little while back, the 26-year-old came out with a pattachitra-style wildlife map of Odisha, featuring the various forms of fauna found in the state, with their different biodiversity zones in the background and the indigenous communities that live in close communion with them.
Read: Top 5 Wildlife Destinations of Odisha
The tableau-style map is populated by the mammals of the state including the Indian pangolin, the leopard, the blackbuck, the four-horned antelope, the spotted deer, the wild boars, avian species such as the osprey, the Malabar pied hornbill, the lesser adjutant stork, the barn owl, and reptiles like the king cobra, the saltwater crocodile, and the water monitor lizard. Shaw also includes species such as Irrawaddy dolphins and Olive Ridley Turtles (the Odisha coast comprises the largest nesting beach of the latter).
“I am from Odisha, so I had travelled to a lot of places, and also had my research ready beforehand. I have also travelled to West Bengal, Delhi and Rajasthan, and also the south,” the artist says, after I ask him if about the kind of travel that he had to undertake to understand the forest and faunal landscapes so closely. "There is a lot of similarity between West Bengal and Odisha when it comes to arts and crafts, the tribal influences in the traditions of both. They use natural substances for their primary colours, and the tradition of mud painting is there as it is."
Read: The Comb-Collectors of Odisha
Shaw recently announced he will be doing an Andhra Pradesh map in a similar style—this time inspired by the kalamkari of Srikalahasti in Chittoor. “The Andhra Pradesh map would be a much more extensive one, going beyond the scope of the Odisha map that I made, which had wildlife and tribes. I will include the biodiversity, food and other elements of culture,” Shaw explains in his soft-spoken manner.
The teaser of the Andhra map shows the river Godavari flowing into the Bay of Bengal, the little hills speckled all around, and ornate, traditional-style interpretations of the wildlife of the region—blackbuck, elephants, the Bengal tiger, and even Olive Ridley Turtles. “The part of the border area where Odisha and Andhra Pradesh meet has tribes with similar customs in both states. That similarity will also be shown in this map. I'll make it in a way that we can see both the similarity and the diversity,” he adds.
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The map went viral and had wildlife lovers and art enthusiasts swooning over the Bhubaneswar artist’s previous work as well. Shaw’s body of work on Instagram alone is an impressive collection of surreal everyday scenes from the forest, created in a folk-art style.
.jpg "Courtesy of Sudarshan Shaw")
Take, for instance, his whimsical portrait of the elusive fishing cat, baghrol—the state animal of West Bengal—done in the Kalighat style of painting. Another artwork depicts a tiger pouncing upon a deer, both animals wound around each other, yin-and-yang style, painted in acrylic on a slightly flat-faced pebble. Pen drawings of owls, rhinoceroses and caracals, and miniature sculptures of elephants and tigers dominate the rest of this collection.
Shaw has an interesting series where he posts artworks depicting forest creatures as impressive, awe-inspiring superterrestrial beings imparting a divine, ineffable force to the wild. It is reminiscent of the artist’s belief that wildlife comprises the tribal communities of a place, too. In these series of artworks, Shaw interprets the lives of these beings as grand narratives and extraordinary happenings. Consider this depiction of the mating of a tiger and a tigress.
“When we worship Lakshmi, we have the barn owl beside her, and when we worship Shiva, there’s Nandi at his side. It was very important for me to depict animals as equals, in equal light. That’s what the whole divinity series is all about,” a passionate Shaw says.
"My style borrows from the traditional ways in which we have been looking at wildlife. We worship gods and goddesses and they can be seen in their royal attire. But we never see that [finery] on the animals accompanying them—I wanted to portray them in the same style, as gods and goddesses,” he adds.
Read: Responsible wildlife tourism as a conservation tool
The burgeoning community of artists and bloggers on the web today who are making the most of the little, cult-like conservation revolution, is coming up steadily. Their artwork is usually centered on both endangered and lesser-known forms of wildlife and their own stylistic interpretation of it. While this is definitely creating mass interest in favour of conservation and the role of fragile ecological zones and their beings, one wonders wherever the need to preserve the much-needed privacy of the forest went?
“Imagine seeing a jungle in India about 200-300 years back, before we this scale of invasion had happened in these spaces…The concept of national parks is a very Western idea. When you go to a tribal land in India, or in Odisha, you see the mood is very different over there. Conservation is in terms of numbers, not in terms of life. This can be achieved only when we try to study traditional ways of engaging with the animals,” he explains, adding that the stories and elaborate narratives of the lives of wild animals that he often shares on his page, are actually the words of the members of the forest community that he has had the experience of interacting with.
And while we're at it, what better than the following inspiration to encapsulate the idea—straight from the proverbial horse's mouth?
“The Hornbill, farmer of the forest, rightly dresses up as an emperor but with no sign of arrogance! This powerful realisation sent a clear sense of heaviness and silence inside me, I might have been feeling just like a hornbill would always feel.”
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