Bhuri Bai: from daily-wage worker to Padma Shri

In 1980, Bhuri Bai was carrying bricks at a construction site in Bhopal for six rupees a day. The site happened to be Bharat Bhavan, the arts complex being built under the eye of painter J. Swaminathan. He asked the young Bhil woman if she could paint. She said yes, on walls, at festivals, the way her mother had taught her.

He handed her paper and poster colours. She had never painted on paper before. What came out, animals, trees and spirits built from fields of coloured dots, became some of the first Bhil paintings ever made on canvas.

Why her story matters

Bhuri Bai went on to receive the Padma Shri in 2021, one of India's highest civilian honours. But for four decades in between, she kept painting while working as an artist on the Bharat Bhavan campus, patient, prolific, unhurried.

“I painted what I knew: the horse, the tree, the festival. The paper was new. The stories were not.”

Every KARM 108 drop follows the trail she blazed: folk artists moving to new surfaces, cloth, cotton, streetwear, without surrendering the story. The surface changes. The hand does not.