Primitive Art
The description "primitive" is now dismissed as a nearly meaningless and perjorative terminology once used for some arts of Africa, Oceania and Pre-Columbian America.

In the 19th century, "primitive art" was characterized by its use of bold forms, simplicity of manufacture (by way of the simple tools used to fashion images), its seemingly loose interpretation or disregard for the notions of symmetry, precision or fineness treasured in other non-western (the "Oriental") cultures.

Modern artists like Picasso and the German Expressionists treasured the new-found "primitive art" flooding in from European colonies in Africa, the Pacific and the Americas for the diametric opposition, and thus originality, that these objects represented in the face of the Renaissance, Baroque or Neo-Classical periods.

Primitive curiosities became the inspiration for modernist experiments with the subconscious and the expression of primal impulses. What the European modernists could not have known (from the often cursory if not erroneous labels in the curiosity museums of Paris and Munich) was that Bantu, Polynesian and Native American statuary, masks and other ritual objects were usually made not as "personal" or "primal" expressions by native artists but as public, secret or funerary art by state-sponsored or other professional artists for demanding patrons. Often, adherence to tradition and the artists' own subscription to memberships in artist societies and unions were more akin to Medieval European craft guilds than modernist individualism. The complex, intellectual and spiritual iconography of "primitive" art was also a mystery to European artists and collectors at the time, Europeans chosing to focus on style and other formal aspects of the foreign art instead.
(definition©Prof. Lawrence Waldron)

Primitivisim can be observed in Shastri Maharaj's art through the simplicity of form and image. There is a conscious attempt at minimalism in the paintings. References are made to early civilizations associated with pre historic India. Also, works are presented in the form of tablets, pictographs.
There is strong fascination with the tribal, folk, indigenous and ancestral.