Twenty-six Central Avenue, Choubey Colony, Raipur 492001 is a famous address in Chhattisgarh’s capital for the art connoisseurs, for the two-storied house is a veritable treasure trove of tribal art, mostly of Bastar.
The landlord, 75-year-old Niranjan Mahwar, has collected the tribal artefacts from nook and corner of Bastar and also from other tribal belts of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Assam, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra over a period of five decades.
His collections, which number over 6,000, could perhaps make him the biggest private art collector in India.
“The art pieces are jostling for space in every nook and corner of the house. All available space in the house including cupboards, almirahs, trunks and boxes are full of my collections. Over five decades of searching and collecting have yielded over 6,000 artefacts from length and breadth of Bastar,” Mr Mahawar, who authored Bastar Bronzes, Tribal Religion and Art, a first documentation of art and culture of Bastar tribals, told this newspaper here on Saturday.
His collections include paintings, musical instruments, tobacco pouches, tools, weapons, jewelleries, exquisite combs and hair pins, lamps, horses, elephants, camels, bulls, tigers, masks, images of gods and goddesses. They are made of wood, metals including bronze, copper and brass, terracotta, and stone.
“The artefacts are aesthetically balanced in composition, dextrous in line and deal with mythological and religious themes and they exhibit technical skill and aesthetic sense of tribals,” he says.