Activity Books
Artventures of Baiga: The Complete Guide to Madhya Pradesh's Tribal Art (Set of 3)
Baiga painting belongs to a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group living across six districts of Madhya Pradesh. For most of its history it existed on two surfaces only, the mud walls of Baiga homes and the skin of Baiga women, marked through a tattoo tradition called Godna that records a woman's life in a fixed order, from the Seeta Rasoi design at adolescence to the dot patterns applied after marriage. Neither surface was built to last. It took an outside artist, the late Ashish Swami, arriving in Lorha village and training more than thirty local women to work on paper, for any of it to survive past a monsoon. Jodhaiya Bai Baiga was among them. She was 69 when she painted on paper for the first time in 2008, and she received the Nari Shakti Puraskar in 2022 and the Padma Shri in 2023, fifteen years after she started. The Artventures of Baiga set of three books takes you through that tradition from a child's first pattern to a full staged composition. Elementary tells the story through Prakash, a boy who finds his Amma painting animals on their wall and learns the history through her answers, then works through seven pattern pages and six four-step motifs. Essentials drops the story frame and gives adult learners the material straight: the five-colour palette and where each pigment comes from, the three Baiga deities, and a full section on Godna, before moving into six reference paintings and thirteen creative exercises. Expert is the only book with a dictionary, roughly forty catalogued forms across patterns, motifs, deities, trees and weapons, alongside staged compositions like a Ramayana episode of your own choosing and a Kali sketch to complete with tattoo work. Every motif across all three books traces back to five women of Lorha village, Umaria district: the late Jodhaiya Bai Baiga, along with Sakun Bai Baiga, Ramrati Bai Baiga, Rupa Baiga and Hema Baiga, three generations of one family. Three of them, Sakun Bai, Ramrati and Rupa, are painting and teaching today. What makes this set stand out The three levels cover the full arc of the form, from Prakash and Amma's first pattern in Elementary to the dictionary and staged Ramayana compositions in Expert. Reference paintings across the set are credited by title and artist to five working women of Lorha village, not adapted anonymously. Essentials and Expert cover material most tribal art books skip entirely, including the Godna tattoo tradition, the three Baiga deities, and what urbanisation is doing to both. The set works as a child's first activity book, an adult's practice workbook and a reference library for someone already painting, without repeating itself across levels.
