Primitive Accumulation

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of indigenous art in postcolonial India as a contradictory process and phenomenon. The article traces the career of Gond art, from its discovery in the jungles of central India to its state institutionalization and its presence in the contemporary international art scene. Through the example of the life and the untimely death of Jangarh Singh Singh, arguably the first Gond painter, the article interrogates the postcolonial Indian state's relationship to indigeneity and indigenous art, and the social and economic conditions of the production, circulation and accumulation of this art in the world. Using the Marxist concept of Primitive Accumulation as an analytical framework, the article makes a case for Gond art to be understood as providing allegories of global capitalism's desecration of tribal lands and culture, but also as engaging in a critique of, and providing resistance to, the ongoing accumulation through dispossession.