The curse of loving their land , water, forest,
where they prefer to die as mad lover
beautifully damaged people!
With stars in their eyes, n moon in their minds,
Thoughts flowing like an undammed river
— Abhay Xaxa, Beautiful Damaged People
Vivid lines cascade across land, leaves, and bodies in Rahul Buski's paintings, gushing, flowing like a river yearning to know every crevice of land, undammed, before capitalism constrained her joy. This imagery, and the title of the artist's debut solo exhibition draws from late Adivasi rights activist-scholar Abhay Xaxa's poem Beautiful Damaged People (2017). Xaxa describes the thoughts of Adivasis flowing with this unbridled vigor. We see that force in the way Buski paints, his images both embodying the experiences of his Paniya Adivasi community in Wayanad, Kerala, and participating in protest against state violence and corporate land grabs.
With every brushstroke, Buski layers a strong energetic charge. The dense, sedimented texture he constructs captivates attention in his striking compositions. For the artist, it is not a simple stylistic choice. "It comes directly from my life as an Adivasi person, and my connection to the land, the forest, our memories, and our community," writes Buski. In Koova (95 x 72 in, 2025), his brush moves in long, linear strokes to form verdant leaves, dense polygonal shapes for rocky ground, and thin, short swirling strokes to generate billowing clouds. The playful contrast between the three captures the dance of natural energies. His texture, always morphing, endows each entity — animate and inanimate — with a fullness that asserts their innate knowledge and vitality.
For centuries, Adivasi communities have been misrepresented and stereotyped. Although this has its origins before colonisation, it was exacerbated by British policies such as the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, which classified entire communities as hereditary criminals. While colonialism did not necessarily invent every representation of Indigenous difference in India, it systematised, racialised, bureaucratised, and juridically hardened heterogeneous forms of difference into fixed categories. Postcolonial institutions and popular culture subsequently inherited and reworked many of these representational structures. Sanjukta Das Gupta and Rajshekhar Basu note, "the Adivasi was portrayed as a savage, whether ‘criminal’ and wreaking terror in the countryside, or ‘noble’ and living a life of Arcadian simplicity in an egalitarian society.' Either extreme is harmful: 'excessive pity and excessive contempt are both equally potent instruments of ‘othering’ people.' Ganesh N. Devy and Abhay Xaxa remind us.
The cost of such flattened ideas emerges in Ottamaram Kaada (72 x 48 inches, 2025). A figure draped in beautifully rendered white fabric holds a young child in a sling of cloth, the duo making a striking image against a dark vista of a small settlement by a lake. Thick lines running across her body make the figure distinctly alive. Her face is not visible, but with one extended hand she holds, or hides, a trio of heads. White masks cover the upper half of each one, with narrow holes just for their eyes. Their mouths appear in varied states, one screaming, the other naively poised in observation, and the third without an orifice. Their obscured bodies combined with their similar appearances, save for the extreme differences of mouth, suggest to me their presence as stereotypes from which non-Indigenous viewers can 'choose a head' to place atop the maternal figure. This is a sharp critique of the limited characteristics that Brahminical-mainstream knowledge systems place upon Adivasi communities. Eschewing docile representations, the heads confront our gaze, refusing to play by our rules. Across his practice, Buski challenges the flattening of Kerala Adivasi narratives. Undertaking an auto-narrative mode of making, the artist delves deep into personal, ancestral, and direct communal narratives to imbue bodies and landscapes with complexity, and they emerge multifaceted with joy and pain, cracks and tenderness. Through his brush, each figure teems with agency, each is a subject who navigates the world on their own terms.
The triptych Muly (96 x 72 inches (each), 2026) pulls us into its red-soil landscape. Darker patches of red, woven with black and blue, interspersed with patches lightened by yellow. Together, their patterning creates an undulating field of mounds and ridges, pulsing with life.
Buski writes —
'For me, land isn't just a background setting. It’s a living ancestor that holds our history and who we are. The heavy, layered textures show how complex Indigenous life really is—where stories, scars, deep knowledge of nature, displacement, and survival all exist together. I purposely avoid making things look smooth or simplified. Indigenous life shouldn't be flattened into romantic stereotypes or the kind of clean images colonial mindsets prefer. These rough,
broken surfaces force people to look at our reality on our own terms.’
Four trees line up vertically across the surface of Muly. Only their richly textured trunks are visible, lush strokes in primary colours evoking a deeply primal life source. On the right, a lone figure stands with one trunk resting on his shoulder, as if mid-action. Looking at the organic detachment at the base of the tree, we might infer he is retrieving a tree that has undergone natural death, now to be reused as firewood, clearing space for regrowth. Looking at it from another perspective, the Adivasi man is hoisting the tree upwards from his shoulder, willing it into the ground, piece-by-piece reforesting a thirsty land which had been cleared of forest cover by corporate land mafias. The texture on the figure's legs and feet matches that of the tree trunk; it is evident that for Buski, there exists an inseparable relation between the two.
The ethos of deep interconnection is part of most, if not all, Indigenous cosmologies world over. In Abya Yala (also known as South America), the term territorio cuerpo-tierra (territory body–earth) has been proposed by Lorena Cabnal, a Maya-Xinka community feminist from Guatemala, a concept she developed over 29 years with the Aymara women in Bolivia and Xinka women in Guatemala. Sofia Zaragocin and Martina Angela Caretta elaborated on this, writing, ‘there is no ontological difference between territory and the body. Hence what is done to the body is done to the territory and vice versa’. Buski's painting Thalum, Thakarayum, Ratti (96 x 72 inches, 2025) embodies this ideology. Two figures draped in white, a motif the artist often deploys to indicate his Adivasi community, walk down a path sandwiched between water on both sides, their hands holding instruments from everyday life. Strikingly, from their necks, shoots of diverse plants have emerged, verdant leaves of many shapes and sizes hiding the figures' faces. Behind the figures on the left we see woven reed fishing traps as part of a finely textured waterscape. On the right, stands another unusual figure. The trunk and tusk of an elephant are conjoined with a knee-length white mundu revealing two densely lined legs beneath. The elephant is often seen around the artist's homelands, becoming a recurrent actor in his paintings. Rendered at a miniature scale in the lower area behind the human-elephant figure, there sits a montage of snippets from the community, moving from land-rights protests, to maternal resilience, musical histories, and moments of atrocity. This spatial composition suggests the hybrid creature as a bearer of a cultural archive, grounding the community in a deeply rooted sense of belonging. Making the entwinements between human, flora, fauna, land, and water palpable, Buski emphasizes the entrenched nature of these connections. The natural world is not separate, but an extension of the human body, and the effects of deforestation, mining, and land poisoning affect the community in a material and corporeal way. Cabnal underlines, 'Historical and oppressive violence exists both against my first territory, the body, and against my historical territory, the earth.'
Protests against violence inflicted on the land and body are a central influence on Buski's practice. The artist recounts witnessing a wave of hunger deaths in Wayanad between 1999 and 2003 as a young boy, an experience which radicalized him to the realities of the tribal condition. Over the last several years, historical protests like the Muthanga land struggle and Aralam farm occupation have been pivotal for the artist and his practice. In 2003, frustrated by delays in land distribution, which was resulting in starvation deaths, hundreds of Adivasi families occupied temporary huts inside the Muthanga Wildlife Sanctuary in Wayanad district. During the protest, Kerala Police fired 18 rounds, resulting in two immediate fatalities, one of which was a tribal leader. More recently, in 2024, tribal communities in Kannur district opposed leasing Aralam farmland—originally purchased with tribal rehabilitation funds—to private companies and commercial ventures like pineapple cultivation. The effects of land dispossession, and the resistance against it, are threads that weave across all of Buski's works, some directly and others implicitly. The anger against state oppression and capitalist greed is most visible in Protest of My Life and Untitled (both 23.7 x 35.5 inches, 2025). The former shows bodies in the midst of protest, their hands raised in fists and holding flags. Their faces are ablaze, demanding justice and dignity through their due rights. In the latter image, we see many legs, some overlapping, perhaps from the same protest, textures flowing between limbs and soil. They are firmly rooted on the ground, asserting their presence and centuries-old connection with the land.
Buski writes, 'Painting is my form of protest. It's how I reclaim our presence, our history, and our ties to the land.' One is captivated by the commitment and determination of his process that emanates from the work. It is this immersion in direct experience and precipitation of ancestral aesthetics that elevates his visual language into its own unique frequency. Reverberating with the emotional registers of struggle, kinship, and survival, Rahul Buski's skillful paintings stretch across worlds, embodying in unison their rooted specificities and the humanist claim to dignity.
— Shaunak Mahbubani
