The Night Life of Trees - Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai, Ramsingh Urveti

The Night Life of Trees by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai, and Ramsingh Urveti / ISBN 9788186211922 / A handmade silk-screened 40-page hardcover, 9.5 x 13.25 inches, from Tara Books (India)

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The Night Life of Trees is an exquisite silkscreen-printed art book of tree lore from the Gond tribe in central India. Trees are central to the Gond tribal imagination: in addition to the stories that surround them, trees are important in a lived, everyday sense. There is a Gond belief that trees are busy during the day, giving shade and food to humans and animals. It is only during the night that their real spirit emerges. A collection of work by three of the finest living artists of the Gond tribe – traditionally a community of forest dwellers from central India – this quintessential Tara title has gone into several editions and in different languages.