There is a way of looking at the forest that only comes from having lived inside it — not visited, not studied, but lived inside, generation after generation, until sight and memory become the same. When Wilderness Dreams brings together two artists, Jhulan Bai Baiga and Pisadu Ram Mandavi, whose work makes that difference visible. Theirs is not a naturalist’s forest, observed from a respectful distance. It is a forest known from within — by people whose communities have measured time by its seasons, read its warnings, and understood its animals as neighbours, ancestors, and gods.

The title asks a quiet question: what does wilderness dream of, when it dreams? Perhaps only of being remembered rightly — held not as backdrop or resource, but as kin. Pisadu Ram hails from the Muria community and grew up in a farming family in Bastar, learning to carve wood before he ever touched a brush; Jhulan Bai was from the Baiga community and spent decades in and around the forests of Umaria, absorbing its songs and rituals long before, astonishingly late in life, she began to paint. For both artists, the wilderness had been dreaming quietly for years before it finally found its way onto paper.

Pisadu Ram’s painted world is patiently built dot by dot — trees dense with birds and animals, skies stitched from thousands of small, unhurried marks, the visual equivalent of a dream resolving slowly into detail. Jhulan Bai’s animals arrive by the opposite route: sudden, combustive, colour and pattern thrown down with the urgency of a vision that refuses to wait — her tiger not an animal observed but Baaghesur, a guardian met and reckoned with. One dreams in accumulation, the other in eruption. Both are unmistakably visions rather than records, carrying belief as much as observation.

There is an unspoken urgency beneath this exhibition, too, one worth naming plainly: the very forests that taught these artists how to see — their density, their creatures, their sacred order — are receding, cut back and fragmented during these artists’ own lifetimes. What Pisadu Ram and Jhulan Bai carry in paint is not nostalgia but testimony: a forest that lived inside them long enough to become legible, at the very moment the forest itself is disappearing from the ground beneath it. When Wilderness Dreams is, in the end, a record of that inheritance — intimate, endangered, and still, for now, vividly alive in their art.

Minhazz Majumdar
Curator and Cultural Strategist