A Tour of Bhuj

A few months ago my external hardrive crashed, and with it, all my photos from India. I have been mourning the loss for awhile. Then, like a ghost speaking to me from the beyond, I realised I had a few photos uploaded but not published on this blog, a pending post on Bhuj.

So here they are, the ghost of photos lost.

A tour of Bhuj.

In the old city, there are many winding streets with stalls selling fruits, chips, and other goodies. The city itself is a mix of old and new, having been largely destroyed during the 2001 earthquake.

In the summer these fruits were being sold everywhere. I am not sure what they are called in English and am having trouble remembering the name in Gujarati (anyone?) but they are slightly bitter and your mouth feels coated by tannins after eating them. they are supposed to be very good for your health.

I love all the hand-painted advertizements around the city. It feels like public art, not visual pollution.

I am slightly suspicious of this carousel for kids (the cars seemed pretty rusty), but I saw families using it frequently. My favorite part was the blond-haired doll in the middle who had been dressed up to be more Indian (bindi and all).

Roadside nimbu-panni (lemon water) and "cold drink" (soda) stand.

Remnants of the earthquake -beautiful and sad.

In the old vegetable market, vendors are lined up seated on a platform selling veggies. I miss those white cucumbers with chili powder and salt!

I had never had a fresh date before India - they come in many colors and are generally delicious! A local juice store also sold fresh date juice, which tasted like a milkshake.

Panni Puri! This street snack is one I only had a couple times because it features water - a dangerous substance for a non-native. They are pretty tasty, though. A fried shell filled with differently flavored water (herbs, spices, sugar). You eat them in a succession of five or six, ending with a sweet one.

Debating prices to take rickshaws was never something I got the hang of our particularly enjoyed. I preferred walking or taking shared rickshaws, where there was a standard price of 5 or 10 rupees to go as far as an hour away. That is how I would get to work if I missed the Khamir car.

I enjoyed how people decorated their rickshaws to indicate their personalities.

This stopped me in my tracks, I just though it was so beautiful.

More earthquake remnants.

Outside the Old Vegetable market!

Upstairs in the Prag Mahal, one of the old castles that was still being reconstructed post-earthquake.

From the roof of the Prag Mahal.

Apparently royalty came here?

A sweet little part where only senior citizens were allowed. It was very, very small. Which, as one of my friends pointed out, made sense, as they mostly just sat inside.

Part of the old palace.

Outside the entrance to the palace.

I had heard rumors of camel milk ice cream from my earliest days in Bhuj and was ecstatic to finally try it. It tastes much like cow milk ice cream, but more watery. It is supposed to be healthier.

Selling women's housedresses on the street.

The entry to Swaminarayan Temple, built after the earthquake. It is a huge complex, housing monks, a school, and a beautiful temple on the water.

A main road in Bhuj.

Riding in a rickshaw usually means multiple people per seat. Often hanging off the sides, requiring hanging on to the roof for support.

There was a military base of some kind in the city. I presume it is connected to Bhuj's proximity to Pakistan, but I never quite figured it out.

Public religious art care of Swaminarayan.

Hospital road - one of the first places I went in Bhuj. This is where some of the only chain restaurants are -including Saffron and Uncle Sam's Pizza.

Along the sides of most roads are slums with homes made of tarp, wood, and stone. In Bhuj many of these people are migrant labororers. Hunar Shalla does a fair amount of work with these slum communities.

A Shared rickshaw! This space would likely have at least ten people in it. Personal space simply has a different meaning.

The new vegetable market.

Collecting trash to reuse.

Public space in Bhuj is pretty male-dominated. I mostly felt pretty safe though.

A Muslim temple on a hill slightly outside town. It has a lovely view.

The juice shop! This shop had all local, organic juices for fairly cheap - about 80 cents for a cup of hand-squeezed juice. My favorite was mango/guava/grape. It comes all layered in a cup, and is beautiful.

At the top of Bhujia fort overlooking the city.

Nostalgia and Woody Allen

Have you ever seen the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris? I saw it with my family when it came out in the theater last year, and wasn’t particularly impressed – I found it very visually compelling and liked the idea of someone going back in time to the “golden era” of Paris (who wouldn’t want to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso?) - but I felt that Woody Allen’s humor was too forced, which ultimately clouded my enjoyment of the film itself. Then last week my friend lent me the movie and I decided to give it another try.

Sometimes you have to see a film (or read a book, etc) at the right time and in the right place for it to have meaning. And somehow, this time, the movie spoke to me in a new way.

Two months ago, I was feeling extremely rooted and present in Bhuj, but for the past few weeks, I have slowly begun to hover above my experience. I am still very much here, yet I occasionally have the distinct feeling that something is askew, like I have stepped backwards out of the scene and become a voyeur, viewing my surroundings through a screen. Then I jolt myself back into the moment.

I think my subconscious is starting to prepare to recontextualize my current experience as memory. Without realizing it I am already selecting experiences to file away for later review, feeling the bubble of nostalgia rise inside me even as I am experiencing something new.

I have begun to have dreams that I am back in the US, confronted with the reality of being home. I will be standing in the cereal aisle in the grocery store, overwhelmed by the brightly colored boxes towering before me, and long for the simplicity of the vegetable stand where I pay 55 rupees for an entire meal’s worth of vegetables and fruits. Or I will step through my front door in Minnesota for the first time in months, ecstatic to see my family and home again, then go up to my bedroom to deposit the relics of India in the emptiness of an unlived-in room. And I will be overwhelmed with an ache in my core, like something inside me has just died. Then I wake up, confused.

Which is real? My experience here and now in Bhuj, or my past and future life in the US?

As I watched Midnight in Paris, what stood out to me this time was not the flashiness or the time travel, it was the idea of escapism and nostalgia. In the movie, the main character, Paul, goes back in time to the “golden era” of Paris, escaping into another world that he considers superior to his own. He slowly separates himself from his present, enveloping himself in that “other” world, even falling in love with a woman of the 1920’s, Ines. At the end (spoiler!), the two go back in time to Ines’ “Golden age” - fin de siècle Paris, the time of Toulouse Latrec and Degas- escaping even further into the recesses of nostalgia. Just as Paul is enticed by the prospect of living in the ‘20s, Ines is drawn to her own version of the nostalgic past. This is when Paul realizes that, basically, no one is ever happy with what they have.

“Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present . . . the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one is living in – it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

As I watched, I was struck by the notion that I was Paul – that I am elevating Bhuj and India in my mind as a way of avoiding the painful realities of life in America. Let’s just dismiss the problematic component of me equating Bhuj with the past and America with the present - I recognize and disagree with the colonial implications of saying India is “behind the times”. Instead, let’s focus on the idea of inhabiting multiple worlds, on the idea of nostalgia as a form of escapism.

You might recall an earlier post where I was feeling nostalgic for America. At that moment (which, admittedly, was only a moment) the envelop of “otherness” in Bhuj felt stifling, both because I was overwhelmed by the cultural differences and because I was sick of being objectified as “the American”. I longed to be home, where I could escape into the familiar. At that point, Bhuj was “the present” that felt difficult and America “the past” that felt safe. But somehow in the last few months that has changed.

Now, as I reorganize my brain and Bhuj becomes "the past", a tint of romanticism is beginning to color my perception of life here. Because I am beyond the "basics", having settled into a pace of life in Bhuj that feels comfortable, I can focus on the good stuff. I can revel in the fact that I am always challenged to think in a new way, constantly confronted by surprising cultural similarities and differences. But if I stayed, would that magic be gone? And how much of it is just me "finding it difficult to cope with the present?" aka America?

At home I have to deal with planning for my future, with money, with social and political realities that are very much a part of who I am, not a study in social and cultural difference. I am not a visitor in the US- I am a resident. And that requires a very different kind of responsibility.

In addition, while I have been away many things have changed, and I don’t know quite what I will find or how I will deal with them when I return. I have changed and grown too, and fear that I will lose the things I have gained as soon as my context reminds me who I was before.

But the difference between my situation and Paul’s in the movie is that he is nostalgic for a past that no longer exists. My Bhuj – which is very specific to this moment in time - will no longer exist when I leave, but Bhuj itself – the real Bhuj – will. It will continue to grow and change, just as I will.

At the end of the movie, Paul chooses to return to the present but make changes in his life that reflect the changes in himself. I hope to do the same. I hope to continue seeking environments where I am challenged to think differently. I hope to be an active student of the small moments. And I hope to come back to Bhuj, and to see how both of us have continued to grow. 

Okay Woody, you've won me over on this one.

Crafts in Kutch Part 4 - Little Stitches

Embroidery

Most people think of embroidery when they think of crafts in Kutch. Each of the dozens of communities in the region has a different style, passed down for generations (mostly) from mother to daughter. Particularly in nomadic communities, embroidery serves as a form of wealth that can be transported easily when the community moves. It is also a significant form of wealth brought as dowry when a girl gets married. 

Historically, women embroidered everything from dowry bags to camel belts, but today fewer communities embroider. Some NGOs (such as Qasab, Kala Raksha, and Shrujan) are working to preserve traditional embroidery by hiring women to embroider items that might appeal to a broader audience, like purses and kurtas, using traditional techniques. Khamir doesn't work with embroidery because so many others do.

There are dozens of embroidery styles in Kutch, and you can read a pretty decent description of the communities and different styles here. 

Styles of Embroidery

From December until March, my primary project was working on an exhibition highlighting textiles - mostly embroideries - from Kutch and it's neighbor, Sindh, now in Pakistan. It was a crash course in Kutchi communities, customs, and history. I worked with an excellent team of people composed of the head of my NGO, a recent NID graduate who had studied exhibition design, and A.A.Wazir, a local textile collector, in implementing the exhibition. I loved having people from all over the world come to Khamir to see the exhibition, and even got to practice French with some of them!

I have lots of information leftover from the exhibition, but won't bore you with it. Instead, I will just give you a basic sense of what it contained.

The Exhibition

Room One of the exhibition.

Room Two of the exhibition.

The collector, Wazir-bhai, showing off his pieces.

This is Wazir-bhai's most prized piece, and with good reason. The stitches are RIDICULOUSLY tiny, and it is COVERED in mirrors and thread. We had a representative of the Indian craft division of the government visit, and he said he had never seen anything like it.

This hook embroidery is traditionally done by men - originally shoemakers. Royalty hired them to make beautiful wall hangings like this one, which was either in a palace or taken on hunting expeditions to decorate the tent. You can see the Moghul and Chinese influences in it.

I love this applique quilt cover -- it is so whimsical! I also enjoy the mix of textiles-
mashroo, tie-dye . . . it is clear that the woman who made it recycled her family's old clothes. A note that though elephants are a popular motif in Kutchi and Sindhi textiles, there have never actually been elephants in Kutch. Instead, Rajastani kings riding elephants probably came through the region at some point in history, and the image became integrated into the visual culture. 

This applique bed canopy is covered in sequins, representing stars, and is a design representing the universe. When you are laying and looking up at the canopy you are seeing the night sky. 

Bandhani (tie-dye) is a pretty complicated craft. I have been
working on a piece of my own and it has taken me weeks just to do a small portion.