BHOPAL: The forested interiors of Madhya Pradesh has scripted a fairy tale with Jadaiya Bai Baiga, an octogenarian tribal widow who has made her international debut as a true blue artist to wow Europe.
Jadaiya of Lodha village in Madhya Pradesh’s Umaria district, who spent over 50 years of her life as a labourer at construction sites — hewing wood and even selling country-made liquor — just to raise her two sons and daughter, took to embellishing tribal mythology and folklores woven around diverse wildlife so tellingly, that her art has now been showcased at the twin ongoing exhibitions at Milan in Italy and France’s hi-art capital, Paris.
Exhibition organisers say her paintings, in vivid colours and portraying the unique human coexistence with diverse wildlife, is what drew attention. Even the cover page of the invite to the exhibition in Milan contains one of the paintings fashioned by the labourer-turned-painter.
Though thrilled with her art finding place in exhibitions at the Corso di Porta Vigentina in Milan, Jadaiya can only relate it to be the land of Congress national president Sonia Gandhi. At least, that is how it has been explained to her.
“I’m a labourer who stumbled into the world of colours and was fortunate to have them showcased at Bhopal, Khajuraho, Mandavi (Dhar) and Ujjain. However, I had noticed that foreigners were more interested in such paintings. But this is the first time my paintings are being exhibited abroad,” she gushed.
“Jadaiya has the rare ability to deftly deal with pink and red colours, which even seasoned painters find tough to balance,” her ‘Guruji’-the several decades younger artist Ashish Swami, a Santiniketan graduate, said.
Swami ‘discovered’ the Baigani painting style (art of Baiga tribals) while running a studio ‘Jangan Tasveerkhana’ at Lodha village, back in 2008 and that is where Jadaiya came in touch.
The Baiga tribe to which she belongs, is one of three tribes of MP (Sahariya and Bhariya being the other two) which have been declared Specific Backward Tribes by the central government.