Sacks and clay pots become sports gear at India's Baiga Olympics
Since 2015, a tribal sporting festival in Madhya Pradesh has turned everyday village objects into sports gear to celebrate and preserve the traditional games of the Baiga community.
In Baihar, a small town in Madhya Pradesh's Balaghat district, an unusual sporting festival has been keeping a tribal community's traditions alive since 2015. Organized by the Balaghat Tourism Promotion Council, the Baiga Olympics turns everyday village objects, gunny sacks, earthen pots, ropes, and bows and arrows, into sports equipment.
Events carry names unfamiliar outside the region: Matka Daud, a race balancing clay pots, Bora Daud, a sack race, along with Tritangi races, Bhalafenk spear-throwing, Vajni Khel, Lipa-Poti, and tug-of-war, alongside more familiar games like kabaddi, kho-kho and volleyball. A torch relay travels through district headquarters beforehand, echoing the Olympic Games it borrows its name and spirit from.
Members of the Baiga community, one of India's recognized indigenous groups, have traveled from as far as Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh to take part in past editions, turning the festival into a gathering that reaches well beyond Baihar itself.
By dressing traditional skills up as modern sport, the festival has found a playful way to keep a community's heritage visible, one relay race and sack race at a time.
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