Rooftop has launched Artventures of Baiga, in three levels

Artventures of Baiga is the newest addition to Rooftop's Artventures series of art books, and it runs to three levels: Elementary, Essentials and Expert. Facts about the artists below were checked against Press Information Bureau records, national news reporting and Rooftop's own artist pages. The conflicts that turned up are flagged at the top of this document rather than smoothed away.

Jodhaiya Bai Baiga was sixty-nine when she first put Baiga painting on paper. Before that the art form lived in two places, the mud walls of houses in Umaria district and the skin of Baiga women, and neither surface was built to survive. Wall paintings go with the monsoon. Tattoos go with the person. Almost nothing from before 2008 exists to look at.

That is the gap these books are trying to close. Artventures of Baiga is out now in three levels, Elementary for children, Essentials for older learners and adults, and Expert for people who already paint. Every motif in all three traces back to five women of Lorha village in Umaria district, Madhya Pradesh.

What Baiga painting is, before you draw any of it

The word Baiga means sorcerer, or medicine man, which is what the community was to the villages around it. The Government of India classifies the Baiga as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. They call themselves Mati-Putra, children of the soil, and they have historically refused the metal plough on the grounds that ploughing opens a wound in the earth.

Where the Baiga live

Six districts of Madhya Pradesh carry the community and the painting. The books name all six.

⬛ Mandla Narmada valley, one of the older Baiga belts

⬛ Dindori Home district of Baiga dance and song

⬛ Shahdol Forest and coalfield country to the north east

⬛ Umaria Lorha village sits here, and all five artists work from it

⬛ Balaghat Southern edge, bordering Maharashtra

⬛ Amarkantak Where the Narmada rises, and a pilgrimage town

The painting runs on five colours. Red, blue, brown, yellow and black, taken from turmeric, indigo, vermilion, white clay and rice paste, applied with a brush cut from a bamboo stick. Figures are drawn for what they are doing rather than what they look like, so a wobbly deer is still a deer. And the background gets filled, all of it. Baiga painters leave no negative space, which turns out to be the hardest habit for a trained artist to pick up.

For the longer version of the history, the colours and the Godna designs before you commit to a book, the Baiga entry in Rooftop's art wiki covers it.

The five artists the books are built on

Baiga painting reached paper because of one outsider. Ashish Swami, a fine artist trained at Kala Bhavan in Shantiniketan, ran a studio called Jangan Tasweerkhana and came across the wall work in Lorha. He taught more than thirty women there to paint on paper. He died in the second wave of COVID in 2021, two years before his first student was given the Padma Shri, so he never saw it.

Jodhaiya Bai Baiga started in 2008. Her work went to Bhopal, Delhi, Milan and Paris, and she made her international debut at eighty. She received the Nari Shakti Puraskar for 2020, presented in March 2022, and the Padma Shri in 2023. She was still living in a mud and asbestos house when the Padma Shri was announced. She died at Lorha on 15 December 2024, at eighty-six.

The other four are Sakun Bai Baiga, Ramrati Bai Baiga, Rupa Baiga and Hema Baiga, three generations of one family, all painting today. Sakun Bai and Ramrati have each been at it about nine years. They teach as well, and front the Baiga course on Rooftop alongside Rupa.