The Monkey and the Crocodile

🧾 DETAILS

Artist: Bhuri Bai

Year: c. 2000s

Medium: Acrylic on paper

Dimensions: (to be completed)

Category: Bhil

Room: Room 2 — From Ritual to Authorship

🧠 DESCRIPTION

This composition depicts a monkey seated atop a large crocodile moving through a blue field, surrounded by other animals and anchored by a fruit-bearing tree. The surface is densely articulated through Bhuri Bai’s characteristic dotted technique, where color and pattern construct both form and movement.

The crocodile’s body becomes a textured landscape, its internal patterning suggesting both physical presence and symbolic depth. Around it, smaller animals—deer-like figures, reptiles, and birds—populate the space, forming a dispersed yet interconnected environment.

Above, the tree extends outward in branching rhythms, dotted with multicolored fruit, while another monkey appears within its canopy. The composition balances vertical and horizontal forces, linking water, land, and vegetal space into a unified field.

🔍 SIGNIFICANCE

• Interpretation of a widely transmitted Indian folktale through Bhil visual language
• Demonstrates transformation from oral narrative → pictorial system
• Strong example of color and pattern as narrative structure
• Illustrates Bhuri Bai’s role in shifting from collective storytelling to individual expression
• Connects tribal cosmology with broader Indian narrative traditions (e.g. Panchatantra)
• Key work for understanding narrative fragmentation and spatial storytelling

✍️ INTERPRETATION

The image recalls the well-known tale in which a monkey rides a crocodile who intends to deceive or devour it—only to be outwitted. Traditionally, the story is about intelligence overcoming force, and trust betrayed then reclaimed through wit.

Yet here, the narrative is not sequential.

It is distributed across the surface:

• The monkey appears both on the crocodile and in the tree → suggesting multiple moments at once
• The animals surrounding them do not witness the event—they coexist within the same field
• The crocodile is not simply a character—it becomes a terrain, a moving ground

The blue area does not describe water—it defines a zone of passage, a threshold between states.

Rather than illustrating the story, Bhuri Bai transforms it into a relational system:

• movement (crossing)
• deception (hidden intention)
• survival (intelligence)

👉 The story is no longer told—it is held in suspension.

🧩 POSITION IN THE COLLECTION

This work plays a key role within Room 2 — From Ritual to Authorship.

It functions as:

• A bridge between shared narrative traditions (Panchatantra / oral tales) and personal visual construction
• A contrast to Warli works where narrative remains linear and collective
• An example of how Bhil artists transform story into spatial and symbolic composition

Within the collection:

• Warli → narrative as sequence
• Gond → narrative as system
• Bhil → narrative as field of relations

This piece marks a crucial shift:

👉 The artist no longer transmits the story.

👉 The artist reconfigures it.

📚 PROVENANCE

Acquired through an art broker in India