Living Lineages at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, brings together Warli, Bhil, and Gond artists alongside Cheriyal scrolls and Bidri craft, running till mid-June. The exhibition makes a serious argument about whose art gets to be called living.
India’s folk and indigenous art traditions have always had a visibility problem. They travel well at craft fairs, dress up handloom stores, and lend their motifs to corporate gifting. What they rarely receive is what contemporary art gets as a matter of course: a room of their own, with the light set right and the wall labels written seriously.
Living Lineages, on view at Kalakriti Art Gallery in Hyderabad through June 15, 2026, attempts exactly that. Running alongside a concurrent contemporary exhibition, Prakriti: A Quiet Continuum, it brings together Warli artist Balu Jivya Mashe, Bhil artist Bhuri Bai, and Gond artists Saroj Venkat Shyam and Venkat Raman Shyam, with Cheriyal scrolls and Bidri metalwork completing the picture. Gallerist Rekha Lahotiis deliberate about the framing, “By placing these practices alongside a concurrent contemporary exhibition, we are not separating them from the present, but acknowledging that folk and indigenous practices continue to evolve and remain deeply relevant today.”
A Lineage Is Not a Syllabus
Saroj Venkat Shyam, one of the exhibition’s most significant voices, puts the question of transmission plainly, “I learned this art at home, from my family and community, and I believe it will continue in the same way. Now, the younger generation, our children, are also learning and will take it forward.”
That sentence carries more art education theory than most curriculum documents: knowledge as inheritance, passed through proximity and practice, never examined or certified. Her paintings demonstrate it formally, built through meticulous dots, dashes, and rhythmic linear repetitions, each surface pulsing with movement, trees and deities and animals serving not as compositional elements but as living carriers of Gond cosmological belief.
Venkat Raman Shyam, whose artistic lineage descends from the seminal Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam, locates his practice at a productive in-between. “My work is contemporary in its approach. While the themes, our myths and stories, have remained consistent, my style, techniques, and way of working are new.” The yellow work in the exhibition depicts the harvest festival’s seed puja, something specific to Gond culture that, as Venkat says, “connects to Indian culture as a whole.”
Balu Jivya Mashe’s Warli compositions carry the tradition’s signature spiral chain of figures, a visual argument that life is a continuous journey with no beginning or end. Bhuri Bai’s Bhil paintings place aeroplanes and goddesses, cattle and ornate village granaries, in the same frame without apology. Cheriyal scrolls, some extending to fifty or sixty feet, unspooling Telangana’s Hindu folklore in vivid, sustained detail, round out a show that is as formally diverse as it is thematically coherent.
The Protection That Doesn’t Protect
Behind the beauty of these works sits a structural problem that the artists name directly. Gond art holds a Geographical Indication (GI) Tag, a legal instrument that should protect community-origin traditions from replication by outsiders. In practice, it has fallen short.
“Now that Gond art has become popular, many people have started copying it,” Venkat Raman Shyam says. “We do have a GI Tag, but in practice, it has not made much difference. The GI Tag feels incomplete without proper application. Artists are still having to protect their work on their own.”
Saroj Venkat Shyam is equally direct, “People outside our community still copy our work, and it’s difficult for us to stop it. There needs to be clearer rules and stronger enforcement so that the GI Tag can actually protect the artists and the community.”
Venkat also identifies a more insidious dynamic, “I feel we have strong art traditions, but sometimes we only value them more when they are recognised from outside. When my work was shown outside India and appreciated there, it also began to receive more recognition at home. This has been my personal experience.”
The external validation circuit, by which Indian folk arts gain domestic institutional legitimacy primarily after Western recognition, is a structural condition, not a personal failing. That a gallery in Hyderabad can offer serious recognition on home ground is neither incidental nor guaranteed, which is precisely what makes it matter.
What a Gallery Owes
Rekha Lahoti is specific about accountability. “Kalakriti’s responsibility towards an artist goes far beyond the duration of an exhibition. When we represent an artist, we work closely with them to build a long-term relationship that supports both their practice and visibility. This includes proper representation through exhibitions, social media, publications, and production support wherever required. We also guide artists towards opportunities such as scholarships, residencies, and meaningful collector networks that align with their practice.”
There is also an honest acknowledgement of economics: “Every exhibition may not always be financially driven; some exhibitions are equally important for what they contribute culturally and intellectually.” Lahoti frames Living Lineages within a broader shift, one visible at the India Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, where artists such as Ranjani Shettar and Asim Waqif weave hand-based practices and craft knowledge into contemporary artistic language.
The exhibition positions itself as part of that dialogue, arguing that tradition does not need to be preserved so much as witnessed. Saroj Venkat Shyam is unambiguous about what witnessing means in practice: “Being part of exhibitions and art fairs has been very meaningful for me. When people see and appreciate my work, it feels like a big achievement. It also gives recognition to our traditional art, showing that it has value and a place today.”
The achievement she describes is not abstract. It is the recognition that a knowledge system learned at home, passed from family to child, belongs in the same room as anything else Indian contemporary art has to offer. Living Lineages does not resolve the structural gaps it makes visible. But it offers that recognition, clearly, seriously, and without nostalgia.
Prakriti: A Quiet Continuum and Living Lineages are on view at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Plot 8-2-465/1, Road No 4, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad – 500034, through June 15, 2026. Open daily, 11 AM – 7 PM.