India Guide
Madhya Pradesh
Bharat Bhavan
Price: Rs10, Rs20–50 for stage plays and performances
Opening time: Tues– Sun: Feb– Oct 2–8pm; Nov– Jan 1–7pm
Bharat Bhavan was set up in 1982 as part of a wider government project to promote visual and performing arts in state capitals throughout India. The initiative fizzled out after the then prime minister Indira Gandhi's death, but Bhopal's contribution has become established as provincial India's most outstanding arts centre.
Inside Goan architect Charles Correa's campus of concrete domes and dour brickwork are temporary exhibitions as well as a large split-level permanent collection of modern Indian painting and sculpture. Rather incongruously placed in the midst of the latter, look out for an eighteenth-century gilt-framed "landscape" by the Daniells – the uncle-nephew duo employed as a part of the "Company School of Painting" during the Raj, which churned out romantic paintings of India for those back in Britain. Bharat Bhavan has a gallery devoted exclusively to adivasi art, in search of which talent scouts spent months roaming remote regions. Among their more famous discoveries was the Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam, featured by veteran BBC correspondent Mark Tully in his book No Full Stops In India. A number of Jangarh's works are on display here, along with a colourful assemblage of masks, terracottas, woodcarvings and ritual paraphernalia. The absence of background information is intentional – the exhibition is intended to represent the objects as works of art in their own right, rather than merely anthropological curios.