The story of Sonabai Rajawar from a small, unknown village in Chhattisgarh is not new. She died in 2007, aged about 80, but left behind unique sculptures of exquisite beauty. Her story was retold recently at the launch of a book called The House That Sonabai Built by Chennai-based Tulika Publishers. The text is by Bengaluru-based artist and art educator Vishakha Chanchani. The photos are by art historian, photographer and anthropologist Stephen Huyler, whose own book Sonabai: Another Way of Seeing provided the material for the new book.
Prisoner of silence
Born into a large family in Kenapara, Surguja district, a 14-year-old Sonabai was married off to a much older man called Holi Ram in the village of Puhputra (also known as Puhphutara), northwest of Rourkela. When they had a child 10 years after marriage, the family moved to a house on the outer edge of the village. Discouraged from venturing out of the house or talking to anybody, Sonabai remained isolated at home even as her builder-husband travelled for work. Sometimes she accompanied him to the fields, but he was a man of few words. “Even prisoners get to talk to other prisoners in jail,” Huyler remarked. Sonabai had no one. Like millions of women in India and around the world, she simply carried on with her life, cooking, cleaning and keeping house. But there was one thing she wanted: toys for her child.
One day, she had an idea: collecting a bit of the moist clay from around the well in her courtyard, she kneaded it like how she remembered the potters in Kenapara did. She made a tightly-bound skeleton with bunched straw and shaped the clay around it, patting, smoothening with water and drawing out the head and legs and tail. She dried these in the sun and brushed on colours with the chewed end of a stick. She coloured with whatever she had on hand — spices, seeds, leaves, vegetables, carbon black from the kitchen, and whitewash from her husband’s building materials.
As the reds, greens, blues, yellows and whites dried on the terracotta objects, they came alive. There were horses, cows, goats, birds, even people. Her boy was delighted. The best part was, no matter how many toys he broke, his mother always made him more. Soon he had more than an army of toys.
But Sonabai didn’t stop. Something deep and primal within her had been cut loose. She plastered her walls and painted them in a style that was common to that region, but she added her own touch. She added her little sculptures to her wall paintings — a hooded snake coiled around the base of a tree; monkeys chattered on another tree; women doing the harvest dance, their straw-hair blowing in the wind. She was innovative and, according to Huyler, this kind of decorative terracotta work was not to be found anywhere in the world.
Today, it is known as the Surguji style (derived from Surguja). When it grew unbearably hot, Sonabai cut strips of bamboo from the building materials and made beautiful jaalis or lattices decorated with her brilliant sculptures to create enclaves of shade in the home. Indian jaalis are renowned, but Sonabai had no way of knowing about them… she didn’t read or even step outside her home. Her work came entirely from her own imagination.
The curtain is lifted
Meanwhile, for some unknown reason, Holi Ram lifted the curfew at home. Slowly, as people came to visit, they saw what Sonabai had done and were stunned. Word spread and soon the well-known artist J Swaminathan, who was one of the founders of Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal, sent emissaries for samples of her work. Sonabai is said to have protested when they broke away samples of her jaali work and took some of her sculptures to show. An exhibition was held and the world came to know her.
Sonabai received awards and accolades. Her son and other villagers learned from her. Some experimented further with styles of their own. Sonabai continued creating as long as there was strength in her fingers. And then she died, happy that her two granddaughters had decent dowries. Not all the Sonabais of India have been discovered, nor are their stories similar, but there are millions of stories in rural India that are the stuff of fairytales.