Sudarshan Shaw is a visual artist and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of ecology, folklore, and indigenous design. Born in Bhubaneswar and shaped by the cultural richness of both Odisha and Kolkata, Shaw’s distinctive art style—’Folkindica’—celebrates India’s biodiversity through the lens of its traditional and folk arts. Whether mapping wildlife corridors, animating cultural memory through murals, or illustrating children’s books, his practice reimagines the wild as a deeply relational, emotional space. His studio, Kyaari, is a tribute to small ideas that grow wild.

In a conversation with Travel+Leisure India & South Asia, Shaw shares his creative process, his design philosophy, and how India’s forests, folk arts, and flying hornbills shape the stories he tells.

Excerpts From The Interview With Sudarshan Shaw 

T+L India: You grew up between Bhubaneswar and Kolkata, two cities rich in culture and craft. How did your early surroundings shape your visual language and relationship with art?

Sudarshan Shaw: I deem myself very fortunate to have been born and raised in ‘Utkal’ (another name for Odisha), a Sanskrit word that literally translates to “the land of finest art”. Bhubaneswar, the city of temples, quietly nurtured in me an appreciation for form—art made in mud and stone, and primary colours co-existing in perfect harmony under the ever-present sun. A page full of alphabets felt dull, almost absurd, while dried palm leaves etched with drawings, patterns, and colours spoke far louder and clearer. Imagine art classes held within the premises of ancient temples during the most impressionable years of schooling. Walls brimming with stories frozen in stone felt animated, dancing to songs of bygone times, silently shaping my visual language. 

At home, a tall gulmohar tree peeked into the veranda and played host to birds I named by colour. With every seed they dropped, they sowed in me a deep love for all that is wild and free. My father would often draw a rooster from a simple egg shape. Enchanted, I filled page after page with eggs and roosters—my very first drawings. And with my maternal home in Kolkata, a city that worships art, I grew up with the sense that art had always been on my side.

T+L India: How would you define your design philosophy? What do you want people to feel when they see your work?

Sudarshan Shaw: My Folkindica is a unique art style that draws inspiration from India’s ancient, traditional, and folk art forms. It borrows its nature from the richness and rootedness of Indian art, its spirit from the thoughtfulness and vibrancy of folk traditions, and its matter from the beliefs, practices, and documentations of ancient indigenous cultures.

It is both biological and cultural, symbolic and descriptive, wild and decorated, local and global. With a vision to decolonise the contemporary Indian graphics and aesthetics that is heavily influenced by the West, Folkindica is a visual language that is true to its land, diversity and heritage. It also hopes to bring back native art as the language of the land and for the land.

When they see my art, I hope for people to feel ‘at home’ and ‘wild’ at the same time—and one among the wild animals and with them. I wish to reignite their imaginations and compel them to fall for art, nature all over again. At best, Folkindica is an art for all—understandable and doable by the masses. Most encouragingly, I have heard from many toddler parents that their little ones keep coming back to my artworks and like tracing along them. 

T+L India: How does travel inform or inspire your creative practice?

Sudarshan Shaw: Travel is the heart of my creative practice, and birds are my most favourite travel companions. When not travelling for real, I am busy taking trails down places on Google Maps.

Maps and artworks are all about translating all travel experiences into visuals. Travel reveals stories of tigers that walk miles to find new forests, of forts and history engulfed by forests, of people who share honey with elephants and bears and run with tigers, and know of each herb by their odour, of wildest strokes and colours hidden behind hands that farm millets and run daily chorus- all and everything my art captures or wishes to capture.

T+L India: How do you approach “mapping” a place not just geographically, but emotionally and culturally?

Sudarshan Shaw: In my mapping process, geography is just a seat for all that plays along the folds of the land and between the branches of the rivers. Biodiversity, history, culture, folklore, lifestyle, and the looming future all add critical dimensions to the land, shaping it into the form it exists in today.

What shape would the map of the shape-shifting basin of the raging Brahmaputra River be? How would one define the Sundarban delta, made of many islands, some repeatedly ravaged by cyclones, others rebuilt by resilience? What colour would the hills of the Eastern Ghats, covered in ragi plantations, take on? Does it change how we think of the mountains if we see them as giant elephants with white snow-heads, like they do in parts of Arunachal Pradesh? How could the colours of the ocean bed reach the trans-Himalayan mountain ranges of Ladakh?

All these questions, and many more, are answered in the layers of colours and shapes that adorn the geographical base of my maps. I believe the wisdom in age-old native cultures acts as a compass to navigate the vast and unknown wild.

T+L India: Many young designers in India lean into global styles. Your work resists that, returning instead to indigenous arts. Was that a conscious decision?

Sudarshan Shaw: Yes, it was a very conscious decision. As an artist, I felt the need to reclaim India’s long-lost pride in its own visual language and art, to start with. In my search for a native aesthetic that could speak honestly of India’s land and its beings, I found infinite learnings in the visual storytelling of folk art forms, the wisdom of traditional practices, the subtlety of historical sculptures, and the colours that reflect our co-existing cultural diversity.

T+L India: You often say your art is about relationships, not just representation. What role does storytelling play in making people care about the environment—or even about home?

Sudarshan Shaw: This reminds me of a transformative story I once heard among the Baigas in the central Indian forests. They say the Baigas would walk the earth barefoot and could sense the murmurs of an impending earthquake days before it struck. While it may seem like humanity has never been more ‘social’ or ‘connected’ than today, in reality, we have drifted far apart—seeking individual selves, isolated lives that do not exist. Far from each other, and even farther from ‘othered’ creatures, the ones who stuck to wilder ways of living- earth, rivers, trees, birds and tigers! Witness the simplicity and power of one collective dance of a native community or an elephant family to cross a river in the middle of the forest, and you would get exactly what I mean. 

Storytelling can potentially weave all these into one. My art consciously brings humans and wildlife together in different ways to blur these differences and reunite us with our true nature. Once that happens, care and conservation would come naturally. 

T+L India: Do you have a landscape, forest, or natural space that you keep returning to? One that has left an indelible mark on your creative vision?

Sudarshan Shaw: Each place I visit leaves behind a slice of land and a breath of air within me, reshaping certain edges and reaffirming parts of my creative vision—tall cliffs along the Chambal river, where vultures perch like a council in session; a pale green hill near Hanle being devoured by herds of sheep and goats; a dot-like circular boat floating gently in the middle of the Krishna river; or a remote Sundarbans island that the sea had swallowed seven times and still it stood.

But if I had to choose one place that truly stayed with me, it would be Kyari Village in Uttarakhand. Tucked into the foothills of the Shivalik range, on the fringes of Corbett, swept by a river fed by forest, it was here that I came closest to the wild. I’ve walked in and around this village many times, and each visit in a different season felt like entering an entirely new world. The blossoms changed, the birds greeting me shifted, and the fields wore different colours like moods.

I learned that a forest reveals itself fully only to those who see it in all seasons. I learned how forests on foot can unleash beasts of imagination, how fear becomes familiar, how alarm calls from a langur or a deer are signs to run, not to reach for a zoom lens. I learned how sizes can be deceptive and how darkness holds the real drama of the jungle.

It was here that my first art series, My Picture of Divinity, was born. A celebration of the bonds that keep the forest alive. That experience sealed in me a deep understanding of universal ‘interbeing.’

T+L India: How do you balance aesthetic depth with emotional simplicity?

Sudarshan Shaw: I would say it happens naturally when stories come from the heart of the wilderness. Both simplicity and aesthetics lie in how living forms and colours just follow light. The diverse forms of living creatures are the many letters of the language of life. I draw my balance between the two by tuning into these natural wonders.

T+L India: Tell us about Kyaari—what it means to you, and how it embodies the kind of design practice you want to nurture.

Sudarshan Shaw: ‘Kyaari’ is a Hindi word that means a small fertile piece of soil bed that is created to sow seeds for humble produce or to grow saplings safely, so they can be planted on bigger fields. I call my space a Kyaari, because that is exactly what I want it to be, a small conducive space where ideas could be sown, to reap modest visual stories, or to even envision wild experiments that could grow into bigger art movements.

T+L India: Any new regions, species, or stories on your travel–design radar?

Sudarshan Shaw: Yes, I have been hoping to travel the expanses of eastern Himalayas all the way up to Arunachal Pradesh! I have already laid my first milestone in the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary under the aegis of several Great Indian Hornbills and a nesting pair of Rufous-necked Hornbills, among many other endemic birds. As I move eastward, I hope to travel under the shadows of Kanchenjunga towards Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary to meet the Buguns, both the rare birds and the community that protects them. 

Here in my own homeland, the hills are sacred. The deities of these hills shape traditions that call for their protection at all costs. I hope to explore more deeply one such powerful story. It is the story of the Niyamgiri hills and the native Kondh community, who continue to guard them with unwavering devotion.

Related: Meet Ajit Singh Tanwar: One Of The Few Male Ghoomar Artists In India

Note:
The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.

The views expressed in this interview are solely those of the interviewee and do not reflect the opinions of the publication.

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