In the hills near Trimbakeshwar, where the forest meets the edge of Nashik, the village of Harsul keeps a memory alive that most of India has forgotten. Every year, after the fields turn green with the first rains and the rice seedlings are offered to the Gaon Devi, the drums begin. Dancers step into wooden masks that are centuries old in spirit, becoming — for one night — the gods, demons, and ancestors who first walked this land. This is Bohada, and Prakash Dapat has spent his life carving its faces.

He learned the craft the way it has always been taught in Harsul: not in a classroom, but at the elbow of the elders, watching how a block of seasoned wood slowly gives up the face hidden inside it. A chisel here for the sharp brow of a guardian spirit. A curve there for the gentle eyes of a village goddess. Natural pigments — ochre, soot, lime — bring each songa to life, the way they have for generations of mask-makers before him.

For Prakash, this is not decoration. Each mask is a vessel — something a dancer wears and, for a few hours, stops being himself. The mythology of his people, their gods and their guardians, their stories of creation and protection, live inside the grain of the wood long after the festival lights go out.

In a world that is forgetting its village deities, Prakash Dapat carves so that Harsul does not forget its own. Every mask that leaves his hands carries a piece of that old, unbroken thread back to the forest, the ritual, and the ancestors who first wore these faces.

In the forests of Vidarbha, where the land still carries the rhythm of the Satpura hills, the Gond people have always believed that the earth, the water, and the sky are ruled by living spirits. Their name comes from the old word Kond — green mountain — and for generations, that bond with the forest has flowed straight from their eyes onto their walls. Long before it hung in galleries, Gond art lived on the mud walls and floors of village homes, painted during festivals to invite good fortune and to honour the natural world. This is the inheritance Ajay Uikey carries forward from his village of Belhara.

Ajay works the way the Pradhan Gonds always have — not sketching first, but letting a single line find its way across the surface, then filling it, dot by dot, dash by dash, until a tiger, a tree, or a peacock seems to hum with its own inner current. It is a technique built entirely from patience: tiny seed-shapes and fish-scale patterns layered so densely that the animal or spirit inside the painting appears almost to breathe. Nothing in his work is invented from nowhere — every deer, every banyan tree, every folktale figure is something he has actually seen, heard as a story from his elders, or felt on a walk through the fields around Wardha.

For Ajay, painting is not separate from living close to the land. The forest, the harvest, the village deities, the small daily rituals of Gond life — all of it becomes pattern and colour under his hand, the same way it has for his community for centuries.

Long before it hung in city galleries, Warli art was never painted to be looked at — it was painted to remember. On the mud walls of the Warli villages that dot the Sahyadri foothills of Palghar, women once coated a wall with cow dung and red ochre earth, then set it right with rice paste and a bamboo stick, drawing a wedding, a harvest, a tarpa dance — the actual, ordinary life of the community, rendered in nothing but circles, triangles, and squares. This is the language Madhukar Kharpade grew up reading before he ever thought of it as art.

He works in the oldest vocabulary his people have: the circle for the sun and the moon, the triangle for a mountain or a tree, the square — the one shape not found in nature — for the human world, the sacred enclosure, the chauk around which a whole painting turns. His figures have no faces, only two triangles joined at the tip, because a Warli painting was never about one person. It was about the field being sown, the circle of dancers at a festival, the herd moving home at dusk — a community, not an individual.

For Madhukar, every line he draws is a line someone before him also drew — at a wedding, after a harvest, around a sacred chauk. Nothing in a true Warli painting is invented; it is only passed on, the same square, the same circle, the same dancers, carried forward one wall, and now one canvas, at a time.

Long before bronze had a name, a craftsman in the Indus Valley shaped a small dancing figure in wax, packed it in clay, and poured in molten metal to let the wax burn away and disappear — leaving behind a form that has outlasted four thousand years. That same principle, barely changed, is what Suresh Pungati still practices every day in the hills above Panchgani, at Devrai Art Village, where adivasi craftsmen from the forests of Gadchiroli have built a home for a technique older than most civilisations.

Dhokra work begins not with metal at all, but with wax — rolled into fine threads and coiled, layer upon layer, into the shape of a deer, a musician, a tribal deity, a rider on horseback. Every coil is done entirely by hand, no two pieces ever identical, because the wax model itself becomes the mould. Once the form is right, it is packed in clay, dried, and fired in a kiln until the wax runs out and vanishes completely — the "lost wax" that gives the craft its name — leaving a hollow exactly its shape, ready to receive molten brass. When the clay is finally broken open, what emerges is something that existed nowhere before that moment: a casting that can never be repeated.

At Devrai, Suresh has pushed this ancient process somewhere it had never gone — fusing raw stone with cast brass, letting metal grow out of rock the way it once grew only out of wax. But the discipline underneath every innovation stays exactly as it was passed down: patience with the coil, faith in the fire, and respect for a craft that has carried tribal memory in metal since before recorded history.