Spirited Wall Art

Spirited — 7 museum-grade prints that set the mood. Sohrai is a harvest-season wall art of Hazaribagh district, Jharkhand, painted by women of tribal and Kurmi communities in natural earth pigments — manganese black, hematite red, kaolin white and ochre yellow — on a daubed mud wall to welcome cattle home after the rice harvest, around Diwali. The forest creatures the communities live among — elephants, deer, peacocks — recur on these walls as a celebration of the wild country around the village. Gussadi is the ceremonial dance of the Raj Gond and Kolam adivasi communities of Adilabad in northern Telangana, performed during the Dandari festival around Diwali. Dancers smear their bodies with ash, drape goat or deer skins and wear towering headdresses of peacock feathers, moving in procession to the dappu drum. Marwar, the desert court of Jodhpur, prized horses and horseback sport above almost all else, and chaugan — the mounted stick-and-ball game from which modern polo descends — was a celebrated court pastime, often painted as a lively diagonal melee. The school is the most intense of the Rajasthan-plains traditions, with saffron and deep-red grounds and jewel-strong colour.

Updated 22 Jun 2026