Durgabai’s art is not to be isolated within some simple-minded, patronising rubric like ‘folk art’ or ‘tribal art’. Her painterly trajectory and innovations hold their own alongside a spectrum of artistic achievements irrespective of place and period. She is highly inventive and ambitious in amplifying the scope and scale of her language. The early Narmada painting reminds me of the synoptic narrative depicted in a Chamba rumal. The recent Narmada series, with its panoramic sweep and intersecting narrative currents, brings to mind Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s landscapes, which have no focal events or principal heroes (‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, for example), as well as some of our Pahari masters (Fattu’s ‘Krishna slays Aghasura’, for instance). Her handling of torsion and dimensionality, her ability to create illusions of ambiguous form and bewildering movement, evoke Escher and the Op Art masters. Durgabai may not be familiar with these references but I wish to emphasise them, so that we do not write off her formal choices and visionary techniques as merely inherited from the Jangarh kalam or reduce them to the artist’s social, cultural and religious background. These paintings are breakthrough artistic productions. They cannot be confined within a simplistic anthropological framework of interpretation. The large Rewa Naik painting with its sinuous intertwining of tree and cow carries the promise of fecundity and interspecies coexistence. The cowbell at the centre of the composition signifies settlement and domesticity for the nomadic family. The elephants, deer, cows, industrious bird-women and the Naiks share an ecosystem that is abundant, punctuated with visual rhyme, camouflage, and affection. There is a kinetic sheen to the work. The serpentine tree form on which Naik’s family walks is magicked into a Möbius strip. —N.Adajania