Noted Warali painter Jivya Soma Mhase was honored with which of the following awards ?
(a) Padma Bhushan
(b) Padma shri
(c) Shilpguru
(d) National award for tribal arts

Question

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Correct — option (3), '(b), (c) and (d) are correct'. The question is decided by a single discrimination: Jivya Soma Mashe (the paper prints 'Mhase', and 'Warali' for Warli) received the Padma Shri, not the Padma Bhushan. Statement (b) is therefore right and statement (a) is wrong, and once that is settled only option (3) survives, because it is the one combination that keeps (b) and drops (a). The other two awards named are also genuinely his: he received the National Award for Tribal Art in 1976, long before the wider art world discovered him, and the Shilp Guru award — the Government of India's highest recognition for master craftspersons, instituted in 2002 by the Ministry of Textiles — in 2002. The Padma Shri came much later, in 2011, by which time his work had been exhibited abroad for decades and he had also received the Netherlands' Prince Claus Award in 2009. Jivya Soma Mashe earned all this for a specific break with tradition rather than for volume of output. Warli painting was ritual work: it was made by married women on the mud walls of a house for particular occasions, above all the marriage chauk built around the goddess Palaghata, and it was not made for sale or display. Mashe was the man who began painting every day rather than only at ritual moments, and who moved the images from the wall onto paper and canvas, which is what allowed Warli art to travel, to be collected and to support a whole community of painters in the Thane and Palghar hinterland. He is routinely described as the artist who took Warli art to the world, and he died on 15 May 2018.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option keeps statement (a), the Padma Bhushan, which is the one award in the list Jivya Soma Mashe did not receive — his civilian honour was the Padma Shri, conferred in 2011. It also drops the Shilp Guru award of 2002, which is genuinely his. The option is built to catch two habits at once: the assumption that a famous artist must have been given a higher Padma award than he actually was, and the failure to notice that the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Shri are separate honours at different levels of the same series.  (b) This is the same Padma Bhushan error in its most extreme form: it asserts the one honour Mashe never held and denies the three he did. Anyone who selects it is treating 'a Padma award' as a single undifferentiated category and has also not registered that the National Award for Tribal Art of 1976 and the Shilp Guru award of 2002 are documented parts of his record — indeed they are the awards that mark his recognition inside India's craft establishment long before the Padma Shri.  (d) Statement (d), the national award for tribal arts, is by itself true — Mashe received the National Award for Tribal Art in 1976 — so this option is not wrong about what it asserts, only about what it leaves out. It denies the Shilp Guru award of 2002 and the Padma Shri of 2011, both of which he held. It is the trap for a candidate who remembers only the earliest of the honours, or who is being cautious and picks the narrowest option on the assumption that the safest answer is the one that claims least.

Concept: Warli painting is the wall art of the Warli people of the northern Konkan uplands, in what are now the Palghar and Thane districts of Maharashtra and adjoining areas. Its visual language is austere: rice-paste white on a ground of mud and cow dung, human and animal figures built from two triangles joined at the point, circles for the sun and moon, and a square enclosure — the chauk — for ritual subjects. Traditionally it was a women's ritual practice, painted for occasions such as marriage around the image of the goddess Palaghata, not a commercial or decorative art, and not signed by an individual. Jivya Soma Mashe's importance in the history of Indian art is that he broke both conventions: he painted outside ritual occasions and he painted as a named individual on portable surfaces, which turned a domestic ritual practice into an art form with a market, a body of collectors and a recognisable authorship.

State PCS 2024 Q5 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q5 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer