Comparative Analysis of Gond, Muria & Bhil Art with Australian Aboriginal Art

Introduction

Across continents and climates, tribal and indigenous art often surprises us with its resonances. How is it that the motifs of a Gond painter in Madhya Pradesh echo the dotted surfaces of a desert canvas from Central Australia? Or that a Bhil artist’s world of spirits and animals can feel strangely aligned with the dreaming stories of the Pintupi or Yolngu? These are not accidental parallels. They emerge from communities whose imaginations grow close to land, myth and memory, worlds where art is not merely aesthetic but a way of mapping relationships between people, place and ancestry. This blog explores these similarities and divergences, comparing the visual languages of Gond, Muria and Bhil artists with those of Aboriginal Australian traditions.

Cultural Contexts and Worldviews

Gond art comes from central India, shaped by one of the largest Adivasi communities. For the Gond, stories are not separate from the natural world. They rise from the forest floor, travel through animal beings and settle into the patterns of birds, trees and hills. Their worldview is animistic and their art mirrors this belief, turning nature into a living cosmos.

The Tiger God: A Cosmic World of Five Senses in Gond Painting by Venkat Shyam

The Muria, culturally related to the Gond, view art as inseparable from performance. Their famed ghotul institutions, which are youth dormitories, became spaces of ritual, dance and theatrical expression. Muria art often appears on objects and environments connected to performance, making it a living component of their cultural rhythm rather than a standalone artifact.

The Bhil communities of western and central India bring a different artistic tradition. Their art leans heavily on dotted patterns, linear textures and vibrant colour fields. These artworks often narrate clan histories, myths of animals and plants and memories of hunting or seasonal cycles. Though diverse, the Bhil share the belief with the Gond that the natural world is filled with presences, forces that must be acknowledged and honoured through art.

Forest Life in Bhil by Kamlesh Parmar

Australian Aboriginal art, meanwhile, represents an immense constellation of nations like Pintupi, Warlpiri, Yolngu, Kuninjku, Tiwi and many others, each with its own cosmology. What binds them is the centrality of Dreaming (or Dreamtime), a vast network of ancestral stories that define land, law, morality, kinship and cosmological order. Aboriginal artworks are not decorative, they are maps of sacred journeys, songlines and ancestral movements. A painting may appear abstract to an outsider, but to them, it is a coded geography of law and lineage.

Water & Lightning Rain Dreaming by Long Jack Phillipus

Myth, storytelling and function

All four traditions - Gond, Muria, Bhil and Aboriginal Australian, treat art as an extension of their story. Gond paintings recount creation myths, tales of forest spirits, or narratives passed through clan memory.

Goddess of Forest (Van Devi) in Gond by Venkat Shyam

Bhil artworks likewise embed ancestral stories and totemic references within layers of dots and colour.

Community in Bhil by Geeta Bariya

For the Muria, art becomes an active part of ritual theatre, living through the movements of performers rather than confined to a surface.

In Aboriginal Australian art, storytelling takes on an even more codified role. Dreaming narratives are embedded in symbols like tracks, spirals, waterholes that map journeys undertaken by ancestral beings. These stories define not just landscape but responsibility: who belongs to which clan, who may speak for which land and how knowledge should be transmitted.

Emu Art

Totemism forms a shared thread. Gond and Bhil communities often maintain clan totems, which appear as recurring animals in their paintings. Many Aboriginal societies also maintain strict clan totems like kangaroo, emu, crocodile, honey ant, barramundi, each tied to ceremony and law. Art becomes a way of teaching, a method for transmitting cosmology, morality and social norms to younger generations.

Aboriginal artworks are often telling a story

Materials, surfaces and techniques

The surfaces on which these traditions emerge speak volumes about their roots. Gond, Muria and Bhil paintings were originally created on walls of mud-plastered homes, courtyards and community structures. Natural pigments such as soil, charcoal, plant sap and cow dung formed their palette. The shift to paper and canvas is recent, driven largely by the art market and contemporary demand but the underlying techniques remain the same, with outlines filled with dots, dashes, cross-hatching and intricate pattern work.

Australian Aboriginal traditions span a wider geographical range and therefore a wider variety of surfaces. Rock art appears across the continent with hand stencils in caves, spirit beings painted on shelter walls and vast galleries that may be tens of thousands of years old. Bark paintings, particularly from Arnhem Land, use ochres applied to strips of stringybark. Ground paintings with ephemeral designs created with sand, feathers and pigments appear during ceremonies. The modern acrylic movement, beginning in Papunya in the 1970s, brought these visual languages onto canvas.

While Gond and Bhil artists create densely patterned animal forms filled with internal motifs inspired by nature and philosophy.

Nurturing Harmony: Gond of the Splendour of Nature by Kailash Pradhan

Read these blogs to know more about the patterns used in Gond art.

Lion and Birds in Bhil by Shersingh Bhabor

Aboriginal techniques include dot painting fields, cross-hatching (particularly in Arnhem Land), and the famed “x-ray” style that shows bones and organs of animals as if seen through translucent skin.

Dream Time Stories X-Ray Animals

Though visually distinct, both traditions use repetition not only as texture but as meaning.

Visual Grammar and Iconography

Despite geographical distance, Gond, Muria, Bhil and Aboriginal artworks share a fascination with repetition. Dots, lines and rhythmic marks become carriers of story and energy. In Gond art, an animal’s body might contain a universe of patterns like scales, feathers, geometric patterns representing a variety of natural and philosophical symbols.

The Nature's Balance In Gond by Sandeep Dhurve

Bhil artists use dotted fields to anchor scenes in memory, each dot symbolising a seed of life or a moment within a larger story.

Fish In Bhil by Shersingh Bhabor

Aboriginal iconography includes its own symbolic grammar where concentric circles mark waterholes or campsites, U-shaped figures represent seated people and parallel lines denote paths or songlines. Dot fields often describe landforms, time or ceremonial secrecy. Cross-hatching can signal clan ownership or spiritual affiliation. These motifs operate like languages that are precise, coded and deeply tied to cultural protocol.

Scale and context of viewing

Originally, Gond, Bhil and Muria artworks were communal and domestic. They lived on the walls of houses, courtyards and ritual objects, meant to be experienced within the flow of daily or ceremonial life. Their ephemerality—was part of their meaning, as they were painted and renewed every season. Today, as these traditions move to canvas, the context shifts as art enters galleries, museums and online platforms, sometimes far removed from the spaces that once gave it purpose.

Aboriginal art carries an even more complex relationship with place. Rock art remains rooted exactly where it was created, to move it is to sever it from its meaning. Bark and canvas paintings have entered the global market, yet cultural rules continue to govern who may paint certain motifs or stories. Some designs cannot be shown publicly and some belong only to particular clan members. The tension between sacred knowledge and global art demand forms one of the central ethical questions of contemporary Aboriginal art.

Transmission, artists and lineage

Knowledge in Gond, Bhil and Muria communities traditionally passed through families and apprenticeships, through ways of learning that involved watching, practicing and absorbing stories over years. The contemporary revival of these traditions owes much to cooperatives, NGOs and artist-led initiatives that help sustain the lineage while adapting to modern platforms.

In Aboriginal Australian communities, knowledge transmission is tied to ceremony, initiation and song. Art is not merely taught, it is granted. Certain stories or symbols belong only to those who hold the right to depict them and community art centres now play a crucial role in mentoring younger artists while ensuring cultural protocols are followed.

Contemporary revival and market dynamics

All these traditions have entered the global art market in the last few decades, creating both opportunities and complications. Gond, Bhil and Muria artists now work on paper and canvas, gaining recognition while navigating pressures to alter motifs or adjust styles to market demand. The risk is that the work becomes aesthetically pleasing but culturally hollow.

Aboriginal art, meanwhile, occupies a major international presence, with collectors and museums actively acquiring works. This visibility has brought serious ethical concerns of appropriation, non-Indigenous copying of designs, unfair payment practices and misuse of sacred motifs. Community-controlled art centres have become essential in ensuring that artists receive fair compensation and that cultural integrity remains intact.

Comparative themes: similarities and differences

At the heart of these traditions are clear similarities. All of these arise from deep relationships with land, ancestry and nature. All use symbolic patterning like dots, lines, cross-hatching as a form of storytelling. All treat art as map, myth and memory, a medium for carrying forward knowledge that cannot always be spoken.

Yet their differences matter too. Aboriginal art is often more tightly governed by cultural rules, defining who may paint what and when. Its rock art remains site-specific and ancient, while Gond and Bhil murals were traditionally domestic and transient. The symbolic languages diverge as well, as Dreaming tracks and songlines differ fundamentally from the internal pattern-filled animals of Gond or the dotted narratives of Bhil painters. Their historical trajectories shaped by colonisation, displacement or regional autonomy have nudged each tradition in different directions.

What can be done to preserve these traditions?

Preserving these art forms requires meaningful respect for community ownership of stories and motifs. Museums and galleries must include indigenous voices in curation, interpretation and decision-making. Supporting community-run art centres helps artists retain control over their work and ensures fair compensation. Cultural intellectual property laws must be strengthened so that traditional designs are not copied or commercialised without consent. Buyers should be mindful of the authenticity of the artwork while purchasing it.

Check out our guide to purchase authentic Gond paintings

Finally, exhibitions and educational initiatives should build cross-cultural understanding rather than feed romanticised or exotic narratives.

Gond, Muria and Bhil art resonate with Aboriginal Australian art in striking ways. They share a profound closeness to land, myth and pattern, a belief that the world is alive with stories and that art is one way of keeping them breathing. Yet these traditions remain distinct, shaped by their own cosmologies, environments and social rules.

To honour them in the 21st century means balancing visibility with cultural agency. Collectors, curators, educators and audiences all bear responsibility to see these works not merely as visual objects but as living expressions of communities, landscapes and ancestral memory. When approached with respect, they become not only art but a conversation across time and place, between people who have always known that creativity begins with the land under one’s feet.

To read more on this topic, check out this blog

Check out our collections of Gond and Bhil paintings here

References

• Jain, Jyotindra. Gond: The Art of Bhajju Shyam. New Delhi: Tara Books, 2010.
• ———. Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India. New Delhi: Crafts Museum & Mapin Publishing, 1998.
• Morphy, Howard. Aboriginal Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1998.
• Pannikar, K. M. The Muria and Their Ghotul. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1972.
• Pijarnik, Cynthia. Bhil Art: Tribal Paintings from Central India. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2008.
• Sutton, Peter. Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. New York: George Braziller, 1988.