Comparative Analysis of Prehistoric Indian Art and Tribal Art: From Bhimbetka to Gond & Warli

Introduction

Art in India begins far before written records or established kingdoms, emerging first as quiet gestures on stone. In the rock shelters of Bhimbetka, some of the earliest traces of human imagination unfold across the walls, with depictions of animals carved in motion, hunting parties and rhythmic human forms on sandstone ceilings. These early artists painted with remarkable confidence, leaving a piece of their world on the cave shelters through lines of pigment. Their work forms the foundational visual archive of the subcontinent.

Centuries later, tribal art traditions like Gond and Warli continue this impulse to interpret the world through symbolic forms and ecological memory. Though shaped by different landscapes and lifestyles, they share a sensibility: art as a communal expression, deeply tied to land, ritual and collective identity. This blog explores the continuities and differences between Bhimbetka, Gond and Warli, three traditions that together map a long history of indigenous creativity.

The Cultural Landscape of Bhimbetka

Bhimbetka is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Madhya Pradesh, home to more than 700 painted cave shelters dating from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Medieval period. Excavations reveal evidence of human presence stretching back over 100,000 years, making it one of India’s richest archaeological landscapes. The rock shelters lie within a forested setting of sandstone formations, natural overhangs, perennial springs and abundant wildlife, making it an ideal landscape for hunter-gatherer communities.

Some of the most elaborately painted shelters show no traces of habitation, which leads us to the belief that these caves may have served ritual or communal functions, becoming spaces for ceremonies, mythic storytelling or group rites rather than domestic dwellings . This distinction becomes essential when comparing Bhimbetka with Warli, where artistic spaces are intimately connected with everyday life.

The paintings themselves form a long-duration record of changing societies and technologies, from hunting bands to early agricultural influences and later historic imagery. The shelters speak through superimposed layers - wild animals from the Mesolithic period, geometric decorations influenced by Chalcolithic pottery designs, and battle scenes from the Historic period. Bhimbetka is thus a vast visual diary that records millennia of artistic thought.

Gond Art

In central India’s wooded regions, Gond artists paint a world where every element of nature carries life, with hills, rivers, trees, animals and birds are showcased in a variety of colors and patterns, again inspired by nature. This tradition, shaped by an animistic worldview, sees the forest not as a backdrop but as an active presence, inspiring myths, clan stories and cosmic memory. Earlier Gond paintings were made on the mud walls of homes using natural pigments. Today, artists often work with acrylics on canvas or paper, but the visual language of dense patterns, textures and narrative depth remains rooted in ancestral thought.

Peacock and the Deer, Gond Painting by Santosh Uikey

Warli Art

Warli art, found in Maharashtra’s Palghar and Thane districts, comes from an agrarian world rather than a forested one. Painted by women on freshly plastered mud walls using rice paste, the art is created during specific rituals such as marriages, harvests and festivals. The style is spare but eloquent, with geometric figures like triangles, circles and lines transforming into scenes of sowing fields, fishing, cattle-herding and the iconic Tarpa dance, where figures spiral around a central musician in celebration. Unlike Bhimbetka’s distant caves, Warli paintings live on the walls of lived-in homes, turning domestic spaces into ceremonial canvases.

Cultural Life of Warli Tribe, Warli Art by Dilip Bahotha

Themes at Bhimbetka: Animals, ritual and movement

Bhimbetka’s early layers are filled with wild animals like sambhar with delicate antlers, deer mid-stride, boars in powerfully arched posture and elephants drawn with a surprising softness. Hunters appear with spears or bows, women collect fruits and honey and entire groups cooperate to trap or herd animals. Such scenes provide rare insight into Stone Age subsistence techniques, from driving animals off cliffs to intricate forms of trapping and gathering.

Bhimbetka Rock Shelters

Early Bhimbetka paintings predominantly feature wild animals

Later layers shift in focus. Instead of wild animals alone, we find images of community gatherings, musicians, dancers and eventually horse-riders and battle formations. Symbolic motifs like grids, spirals, handprints suggest ritual use of space. Over time, Bhimbetka transitions from a record of survival to one of social and ceremonial life.

dancers of Bhimbetka
Photo: By Nandanupadhyay (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Themes in Warli: Settled life and agricultural rhythms

While Bhimbetka shows the life of nomadic hunters, Warli depicts the rhythms of settled, agrarian villages. Fields, fences, irrigation channels and cattle form the backbone of Warli imagery. Marriage murals, particularly the Lagnachauk, capture the community’s collective identity, while fishing scenes, harvest celebrations and nightly dancing depict seasonal cycles. While prehistoric rock art conveys mobility and wilderness, Warli depicts rootedness, a world shaped by the soil, consistent routines and interdependence within the community.

Tribal Celebration, Warli Art by Dilip Bahotha

Net: Warli painting by Anil Wangad

Themes in Gond: Animism, patterns and mythic nature

Gond art grows out of a worldview that sees nature as animate, sacred and relational. Trees are drawn with dense patterns that showcase their inner vitality, animals appear with expressive textures and patterns that uncover the stories within stories. These works often depict myths of creation or transformation, where humans and non-human beings share the same cosmic realm. Gond art thus becomes a visual philosophy, where patterns become a language of spirit.

Graceful Deer: Gond Painting by Venkat Shyam

Ferocious Fauna: Gond painting by Venkat Shyam

Connecting Prehistory to Living Traditions

Despite their differences, Bhimbetka, Gond and Warli share a common artistic temperament. All three traditions lean toward stylisation rather than realism, depicting the world through symbolic forms that carry narrative or ritual meaning. All three place nature at the centre of their visual imagination and treat art as communal rather than individual expression. Through them, we see how certain indigenous ways of seeing such as rhythmic repetition, simplified forms and ecological consciousness persist across time, connecting prehistoric rock surfaces to the walls of contemporary village homes.

Similarities and Differences

While parallels between Bhimbetka and Warli can be drawn, the relationship is best understood as a partial analogy rather than a direct lineage. Bhimbetka’s art belongs to a forested landscape where communities moved with animals, gathered wild foods and painted in rock shelters that often served ritual rather than domestic purposes. Warli art, on the other hand, is based in a settled agrarian rhythm, emerging on the mud walls of houses during weddings and seasonal ceremonies. The contexts themselves differ profoundly.

The materials used for the paintings confirm this divergence. Prehistoric artists relied on haematite, charcoal and other natural minerals and pigments often mixed with water or animal fat, as evidenced by haematite nodules found in excavated layers, with animal haired brushes. Warli artists use rice paste, a medium that reflects farming and seasonal abundance, painted on the walls using a bamboo twig with a chewed edge. Their subjects differ accordingly as well - wild animals and hunts dominate Bhimbetka, while agriculture, domestic rituals and village sociality define Warli.

Yet, there are certain similarities. Both traditions favour simplified forms, rhythmic movement and an emphasis on group and community activity. Both include ritual and symbolic meaning in their scenes. These shared features suggest not a direct descent but a continuity of indigenous visual thinking. It is therefore more accurate to say that Warli is a probable evolute of prehistoric artistic sensibility, shaped by a different environment but carrying forward a similar spirit of collective storytelling.

A similar comparison can be undertaken with Gond as well. While the geographical area is similar to Bhimbetka, other aspects like subsistence patterns, social life, etc. differ and so do the materials, techniques, themes and patterns used.A major distinguishing factor would be the depiction of human-animal relationship - while Bhimbetka paintings look at it as a hunter and prey relationship, Gond art looks at it as interconnection and peaceful co-existence with harmony.

Life in Harmony, Gond Painting by Santosh Uikey

Thus, we can conclude that while it is possible that Gond art might have evolved or been inspired by Bhimbetka, there is no direct connection between the two.

Techniques, function and ritual purpose

The techniques of these traditions reflect their worldviews. Bhimbetka’s paintings were created with twig brushes and mineral pigments, focusing on silhouette, movement and narrative clarity. Gond art evolved its own language of pattern and colour, transforming the forest into a cosmic tapestry. Warli art uses rice paste and geometric simplicity to sanctify domestic walls during life-cycle rituals.

Each tradition serves a purpose beyond decoration. Bhimbetka’s shelters may have been ceremonial spaces for mythic teaching or initiation. Gond art binds community memory to nature. Warli murals bless homes, mark transitions and reinforce the collective rhythm of agricultural life.

Similarly, all Indian art traditions are a means for storytelling. They enable the artist to narrate the stories of their community through a canvas and share it with the world, making these stories timeless. This is one aspect that shines through Indian art right from the prehistoric days to contemporary times.

Preservation and continuity

Bhimbetka’s ancient surfaces now face weathering due to visitor impact and the vulnerabilities of exposed rock coming in contact with light, changes in temperature and relative humidity, etc. On the other hand, Gond and Warli traditions face modern problems like commercial imitation, dilution of symbolic meaning and loss of traditional knowledge. Yet these traditions continue to survive through documentation, exhibitions and the growing recognition of indigenous artists and lineages.

From prehistoric caves to present-day tribal homes, India’s indigenous art shows an enduring relationship between human communities and the land that holds them. While the prehistoric art at Bhimbetka is the earliest visual evidence of this relationship, Gond and Warli art translate this ancient sensibility into living and evolving forms. Together, they form an unbroken chain of creativity, which highlights an ongoing dialogue between memory, environment and collective imagination. Art in these traditions has never been merely aesthetic. It has always been a way of remembering the world.

Check out our Gond and Warli painting collections

References

Allchin, F. R., and B. Allchin. The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Bose, N. K. Tribal Art in India. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1977.

Dhere, Madhavi. The Gondwana Art Tradition. Bhopal: Adivasi Lok Kala Parishad, 2004.

Elwin, Verrier. The Tribal Art of India. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1951.

Ghosh, G. K., and S. K. Shukla. Paintings and Lifestyles of the Warli Tribes: A Critical Study. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2006.

Jain, Jyotindra. Gond: The Art of Bhajju Shyam. New Delhi: Tara Books, 2010.

Mashe, Jivya Soma, and Bulu Imam. Warli: Tribal Paintings of Maharashtra. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1997.

Mathpal, Yashodhar. Prehistoric Rock Paintings of Bhimbetka, Central India. New Delhi: Abha Prakashan, 1984.

Misra, V. N. The Prehistoric Rock Art of Bhimbetka, Central India. Pune: Deccan College, 1978.

bhimbetka