A breath of fresh air, eh? In this age of The International Capitalist Conspiracy - complete with uninhibited greed and deceit, financial market collapses, taxpayer bailouts of the banking industry, 10%-or-higher unemployment, oil-driven economies, consumerism, gutting of services and safety nets, etc - it's reassuring to think there are still a few other options in place in the world. West Bengal still has a thriving Communist Party in place, evidenced by the sign shown here, Perhaps it's allowed since the world's attention is now focused on terrorism - or maybe because it has a few policies that people like.
Yours Truly, floating up the the Hooghly River and perhaps looking a little thinner: the
India Map we set up for the trip should have had a special marker in the bathroom of the Park Hotel where I practiced kneeling and what not the first few days. Unfortunately it was because of a Euro-virus brought with and not a rapid effort to come to terms with the gastro-intestinal bacteria that welcomes almost all visitors. That came later. All said it's better to get that early so you can get it over with and proceed to enjoyment of street food, fear-free.
The piracy team, including Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Russian and US members, on a skiff heading for a temple visit north of the city. We made the 3-hour trip on a huge old steamboat with a story-laden captain and sandwiches that made more than a few people sick later in the day.
Here a ghat, there a ghat, everywhere a ghat. This one is below the colossal Howrah Junction Railway Station. The Ganges River (of which the Hooghly River is a part) is paradoxically sacred and filthily-polluted. The dead are cremated here. The living bathe here. the sewage and industrial effluent collect here. I wondered at the power of belief systems - a process of reflection impossible to avoid in a place saturated with Hindi, Muslim, Buddhist, Janaist, animist and other belief systems (and their architectural markers - up against the skin rashes and dysentery that bathing in the river must entail. I wondered a lot about the sensual barrage and intensity of life and death that's in your face and eyes and ears and nose here - especially up against the pristine, well-behaved and comparatively sedate norms of a norther European city like Amsterdam.
Not the sort of locale where one sees a speedboat with one or two passengers, this photo depicts an overcrowded boat in a place of relative calmness. There was the background noise of honking, factories, boat engines and the sounds of the people along the river's edge - but compared to the street frenzy this was not unlike a monastery high in the Himalayas.
Belur Math, the temple/headquarters of the Ramakrishna Movement, founded by
Sri Ramakrishna. As an advocate of "make all possible attempts to alleviate human suffering by spreading education, rendering medical service, extending help to villagers through rural development centres" he is considered to be "Prophet of the Modern Age" in India. We came upon this festival celebrating his birthday -even though the date was January 11 (and not February 18).
An artist colony with some 5,000 artists dedicated exclusively to the manufacture of statuary for religious festivals. The idea of it all was thought-provoking: Gainful employment is given to the creation of throwaway icons, made by dredging fine silt from the river and plastering it over straw-and-wire forms, painting them, then throwing them back into the river when finished. it's an employment scheme. It's arts promotion. it's recycling. And is also pollutional (since the paints contaminate the river).
In a land of 4-armed deities, a 3-headed dog doesn't seem out of place. India's dog population seems as runaway as its human population. In the artist's colony a shopkeeper thwacked the ground with a stick, startling this menagerie of canines from their slumber just as the shutter clicked.
Slaughterhouse in the New Market. Kolkata, the 13th most populous metropitan area in the world, is a city of shocking contrasts, especially for the first-time visitor to India. The trip from the airport was through a landscape of desolation, populated by stand-alone unfinished buildings. The 4-star hotel was in the city center - without any of the usual visual cues to signify the same - e.g. tall buildings, sanitized streets. Walk 5 minutes north of the 4-star hotel and you come to this place, a gigantic warehouse, replete with vendors of fresh vegetables, Chinese-made knick knacks, silks and other fabrics...and animals in various stages of life and death. We arrived early enough to be met with a tsunami of smell of freshly-slaughtered goats, chickens and who know what else. Live chickens, distressed and shocked, flapped and floundered on mounds of their dead brethren. For most of the trip we ate vegetarian.
Manual labor is alive and well. It's difficult to impart a sense of how much work is done without the aid of mechanization, but the man shown here carrying building materials on his head was typical. Back in the Netherlands we marvel at the magnitude of manual (and animal) labor that went into the construction of the dikes which made possible approx. a third of the below-sea level landmass of the country.
In the same manner that a tour guide can enrich a visit to a destination by clue-ing a visitor into the conceptual, historical and design framework that went into the construction, traveling through India with a woman who's trained in cultural anthropology and sociology (and specializes in the study of urban spaces) was just as eye-opening. This man is not dead (like the woman carried past us a few days later in Puri), but sleeping - on the platform of the train station. It is a country with a climate (and poverty level) that allows for not having a roof over one's head. The streets are lived in. Cows sleep in the middle of traffic. The diseased and damaged are pulled past on carts, a candle and a tin cup on their upward-turned belly. Everywhere the sort of actions considered "private" - e.g. urination, defecation, eating, sleeping - are public - but there's a strict prohibition against public displays of affection or the display of the flesh of a woman's arms or legs. And a VERY strict divide between public and private space!
A legless man working his way down the train platform, his hands protected by footwear.
Not a Wes Anderson 'The Darjheeling Express" experience, our 7-hour trip south from Kolkata to Puri was in a ramshackle nearly-empty train yet a riveting display of water-inundated landscapes overlaid with millenia of human engineering. The eerie otherworldliness of this through-the-window-darkly photo captured the feel of the experience.
And of human labor. Imagine this: you wake up every day with a flow of bicycles outside the window of your breakfast table, in a sleepy, canal-defined city, the centuries-old buildings concealing the mechanized, technological-savvy, fossil-fuel driven underpinnings that sustain it...and after a flight 7 miles above the Earth through 7 timezones arrive at a place with 5,000 years of civilization, the landscape also crisscrossed with water-engineering projects (rice paddies), but almost no mechanization. The technology, however, is (to my mind) uber-sophisticated in that it is a precise balance of needs and capabilities. I wish I knew more about what I was seeing: when I was growing up, we were admonished to finish the food on our plates "because the starving children of India" had nothing to eat. The
Green Revolution of the 1960's - with "the increased use of fertilizers and irrigation" - averted starvation ... yet allowed a vast increase in population. Olga and I mused often on this. My conclusion: technology is something of a curse. Take into consideration the use of antibiotics, fertilisers, fossil fuels: each of these allow humanity to expand beyond the constraints imposed by nature. In so doing, we become dependent on them. Yet their use requires a companion: artificial constraints. Without these in place you wind up with an imbalance between what the human population demands and what is possible within the environment. Our new century will see catastrophes and collapse as the ecosystem is taxed beyond its sustainable levels. European levels of consumption are unworkable if adopted by the rest of the world - much less American consumption levels. Not with 6-10 billion humans.
Our first World Heritage site. Our friend, Hans, is off exploring the first of 11 of these sites (in Botswana) with his "
World in a Shell" project. I suggested he make his way to Orissa (rather than the planned stop in Rhajastan), since the state is host to
62 tribal communities (with approx. 20 of them in pre-modern state). Then there's this: the
Sun Temple of Konârak.
Concept: The entire complex was designed in the form of a huge chariot drawn by seven spirited horses on twelve pairs of exquisitely decorated wheels.
One of the chariot wheels. The ordering concept is the sun is carried through to the wheel: it is designed such that the precise hour of the day is depicted by the shadow of the axle on the circumferential wheel.
Religious sites are designated as either "living" (still in use) or dead (decommissioned, in use as monuments only). Whereas this seems to be primarily a tourist attraction, some of the visitors included those acknowledging it as a religious destination - e.g. groups of women proceeding up the steps with kisses trnsferred by hand to the steps. "Kisses" seems appropriate - given the highly-charged erotic carvings of the temple. 11,000 figures line the walls here, many of them engaged in activities you won't find anywhere in Western religious architecture. Brace yourself for what you're about to see; if there are children in the room...let them look, so they can appreciate the beauty of human sexuality.
Her legs are missing, but you get the idea.
More.
And more.
Joe and Pedro accompanied us to Puri/Konarck. Joe enacts The Man Facing Southeast, with his feet in the water of the Bay of Bengal. I was unsuccessful at getting him to join me in bodysurfing the perfect bodysurfing waves it offered up, maybe because of his fear of being munched by one of its sharks.
3 young men in counterpoint.
One of several dozen
Olive Ridley sea turtle carcasses spotted on a 3km stretch of the beaches north of Puri, killed either by propeller-related injuries or trawl or gill nets used by the fishing fleets.
An example of "tribal art" in another artist village, Raghuraapur, about 10km north of Puri. 120 studio/houses line a single boulevard, its two streets separated by a series of temples. The Orissan government, we were told, grants a modicum of subsidies to the artists. The style is "evolved from Animism, nature worship, Shamanism and ancestor worship. Finally all these early forms of religion have evolved into other higher forms of religion like Brahmanism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism" - and is very colorful, at times playful. The favorite deities of the region are two brothers and a sister: when we first saw their depiction we thought "
Southpark."
We were told repeatedly not to take photos of people, that it represented an unwelcome intrusion. These two artisans reluctantly consented. One of the few English-speaking (and more enterprising) artists met us on the outskirts of the village, waiting patiently as we worked our way to his studio - where we stayed for several hours, examining his work and that of his sister and uncle. It's good to do this as a group to check impulses and sensual overload as you not only examine hundreds of pieces of work, but also work in a vernacular you're unfamiliar with, and work that is extraordinarily intricate (with some of the pieces we saw purportedly taking up to a month to execute).
Early evening, approaching the looming
Jagannath Temple of Puri on a sidestreet, one of a trilogy (including Konarak and Lingaraj) of Orissa. We were awestruck by its massiveness, and that teeming-with-life street that led to is - a minor preparation for the thousands upon thousands packed into the plaza and streets more proximate to it.
Forget this still image - have a
look and listen to the video. Unfortunately you'll just have to imagine the smells. Vendors and buyers. The healthy, the infirm, the dying and the dead. Humans, dogs, birds, lizards and monkeys. Food cooked, raw and deep-fried, stacked, packed, eaten or discarded. Walking, talking, yelling, lying, sprawling, gathered, scattered, intense, distracted, vexed, focused, singing. Wafts of body scents, animal scents, food, garbage, urine, exhaust. Exhausting. Exhilarating!
As the eye moves vertically up this enormity, it does so by passing hundreds of horizontal bands, and therein lies the difference from a Western piece of architecture: to my eye this bears so much more semblance to the constructive process of natural forms, which repeat and iterate cells into the totality. There's the overall sense of the structure (as there is with a tree) as well as the 'cells." It made me think of the termite mounds we spotted - built one mouthful of termite spit and dirt at a time. The roofs of the lower temples were teeming with monkeys.
I thought of inserting the giant rabbit into the sky but this photo by Dr Oh stands so strongly on its own that would have been an unspeakable crime. Like this monkey running around without any clothes on.
Like almost all other Hindu temples, we were prohibited from entering this one. Lonely Planet suggested that one of the hotels might, for a small fee, let us make our way to its rooftop to look over the massive perimeter walls. A stunning-looking man approached us, and we did just that, winding our way up 5 flights of stairs past hundreds of pilgrims camped, cooking, sleeping and communing along the way.
Interesting sidenote: I just figured out why the jewel-tipped technical pens I used during the
medical illustration years were named Kohinoor. "Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the great Sikh emperor, had donated massive amounts of gold to this temple, (even more than he gave away to the Golden Temple at Amritsar). In his last will, he also ordered that Kohinoor, the most precious and greatest diamond in the world, to be donated to this temple, but the diamond could never actually make its way to the temple because the British, by that time, had annexed the Punjab and all its royal possessions." (or as a friend so eloquently put it "as the British shoved their fist deeper up India's ass to rape and loot the Punjab of its treasures."
Perhaps you remember photo or drawing riddles from childhood - especially if you read Highlights kids zine and had to locate hidden shapes. Take a look at this and tell me what's wrong. Give up?! Okay, here it is then: we're driving the wrong way on a one-way highway!!!
About driving in India: in one word "dazzling." Take a slice of road, from left to right: car, bus, sitting cow, walking dog, auto rickshaw, legless beggar on cart, bus, bicycle and another cow or two. The margin between: 6 inches or less, with the motorized vehicles at 40kmh or more. A ballet of movement, and not a single accident seen the entire time. By far the most stupendous journey was on the next-to-last night iin Hyderabad, coming home from a textile show in an autorickshaw piloted by a teen. Far far better than the wildest rollercoaster you've ever ridden on, it was an act of coming to terms with one's own impending death. I nearly knelt on the ground when getting out in reverence of his godlike command of motion.
Our Chinese friend at the conference,
Jinying seemed overwhelmed by the never-ending honking (since in Beijing and the West it is typically a manifestation of hostility) until she accepted the paradigm of echo location - like what bats use. Then it becomes more acceptable. You MUST make friends with the noise. And the smells. And the crush of humanity.
What do you do if you're a Jaina ascetic ln the 2nd century BC? You occupy some
caves (about 33) into 2 hills outside of present-day Bhubaneswar, and spend your life there, carving ornate friezes and bas relief sculptures everywhere! A note on preservation: unfortunately while the Udayagiri caves (seen here) are well-preserved and protected, their counterparts across the way (Khandagiri, from which this photo was taken) are desecrated with graffiti and conversion into Hindu shrines.
At the summit of Udayagiri is a platform constructed around the same time and facing toward the location of the Dhali edicts, about 10km to the south. They were drafted by
Ashoka, the conqueror of Kalinga, who converted to Buddhism after his army killed approximately 100,000 people.
"What have I done? If this is a victory, what's a defeat then? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant.... What's this debris of the corpses? Are these marks of victory or defeat? Are these vultures, crows, eagles the messengers of death or evil?"
During the remaining portion of Ashoka's reign, he pursued an official policy of nonviolence (ahimsa). Even the unnecessary slaughter or mutilation of people was immediately abolished. Everyone became protected by the king's law against sport hunting and branding. Limited hunting was permitted for consumption reasons but Ashoka also promoted the concept of vegetarianism. Ashoka also showed mercy to those imprisoned, allowing them leave for the outside a day of the year. He attempted to raise the professional ambition of the common man by building universities for study, and water transit and irrigation systems for trade and agriculture. He treated his subjects as equals regardless of their religion, politics and caste. The kingdoms surrounding his, so easily overthrown, were instead made to be well-respected allies.
Frighteningly dissimilar to the utter lack of any remorse by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, Rice and Perle for the consequences of their doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, eh?!
As we've made our way through small towns in North Holland, invariably the comparison is made to suburban America. To place things into perspective, you have to give proper acknowledgment to the element of time: perhaps in 4 or 5 centuries - as the shitty architecture is razed and the layers of time add visual interest, the American landscape will become more enchanting. In a similar vein, the variety of architectural styles and detailing across the 3 states we visited was astounding - though tempered by the realization we were examining thousands of years of habitation. One of the ever-present bulls in these landscapes stands in front of a dilapidated architectural gem in
Bhubaneswar - the City of Temples: more than 50 survive where once there were thousands. The Taliban are not unique in their destruction of infidel architecture or iconography.
"The 10th- or 11th-century Lingaraja temple of Bhubaneswar has been described as "the truest fusion of dream and reality."[citation needed] It is dedicated to Shiva. The Lingaraja temple has been rated one of the finest examples of Hindu temples in India by Ferguson, the noted art critic and historian. The surface of the 55 m-high Lingaraja temple is covered with carvings. Tradition among Hindus exist to visit the Lingaraj Temple before visiting the Jagannath temple at Puri." [
source]
The main structure is 55 meters tall, surrounded by about 150 smaller offspring in various shapes, sizes and hues, though the overall design remains consistent.
Moonrise.
In the Nandankanan Biological Park an artsy angular arrangement of crocodilians.
As we wandered down an obscure, empty trail that ran from the elephant moat to one of two Big Cat domains (which were - a pleasant surprise - very large and densely foliated), we discovered the trail wasn't as empty as we thought. Not the sort of thing that happens everyday, but ambling toward us was an elephant.
Zoos are places of horrible sadness, and this one was no different. While it's true this one has a successful breeding program designed to stave off extinction for a number of feline species, and has much more room for the animals to move about in, it's grossly underfunded, over-peopled and filled with fast food wrappers and other assorted garbage. The glass walls penning in the animals whose habitats are eaten up relentlessly by humans are banged on by the same humans, who then yell and harangue the dreary inhabitants. The interaction shown above was sort of good: it probably develops the beginnings of empathy in the kids who are there. On the flip side, this old female salivated incessantly as a child cutting a new tooth, her mouth filled with a huge cancerous growth, her days numbered. She was used for on-the-spot fund-raising: her trained cajoled us to hold out money which she then grasped expertly with her proboscis before releasing into his hands (and pockets). [
Video]
Olga Sezneva:
Actually, we witnessed a very common practice in India: India elephant blessing. BBC recently released this report: The elephants are routinely forced to touch the heads of pilgrims with their trunks as a form of blessing.
But officials say... the practice could be putting the animals at risk of tuberculosis. They say the constant exposure to as many as 500pilgrims a day may be putting the elephants at risk of contracting diseases, including tuberculosis.
What are you seeing? An awesome juxtaposition of Indian-style construction scaffolding in front of a Western-style curtain wall of glass panels!!
Statue detail at the Raji Rani Mandir Temple, Bhubaneswar, one of only 2 temples we were allowed inside of. As you view these ziggurat-style structures from the outside as a non-Hindu, you're left wondering what the interior space is like. Finally, we would know. Or not: though we made it into the interior and even the ground floor space at the base of the form, its ceiling had been walled off, so we're still left wondering what it's like to experience the spatial effect - and with slightly more appreciation of Christian architecture (which non-believers can enter).
The next evening we attended this event, featuring Orissan religious/ethnic music. Perhaps because we were the only Whitey's in attendance, the startled desk manager of the Saraswati Retreat we were lodged in presented us with a copy of the local paper the following morning with a photo of us, "t
wo foreigners enjoying the music."
Three ferociously cute children posed in front of one of 4 statues of the Buddha in the Peace Pagoda, built by those peace-loving Buddhists on the hill above the Dhali edicts. Next to a Hindu shrine...
...where we were
totally hustled. World religions share the hustle: if you want blessed or forgiven or into heaven, you have to pay for it. We thought we were all cool 'n shit getting invited into the temple courtyard where we were promptly told to kneel before [insert statue name here]. "[insert deity name here]
blesses you and bestows on you...what do you wish for ...bestows on you what you wish, an grants you health and happiness to this great man and his woman, etc. etc...please offer your donation of 500 rupees, yes 500 rupees, in gratitude of her blessing." And you know what? We did it! Oh, the attention bestowed on us then as they tried to fish further into our obviously-deep pockets.
"Now come over here, you must have the blessing of [insert deity name here]." Unfortunately we scurried off then before we got too blessed. Reminiscent of the Christmas Eve mass we erroneously imagined might be filled with gorgeous music; instead we heard the sad, sad nasal intonations of Calvinist joy at the presence of little baby jesus on the half-shell, just before they passed around the tray for donations (which you
have to sit through before you can eat his flesh and drink his blood!) But that mark on my forehead sure look pretty. [
sucker!]
Reverence has already been expressed at the wondrous driving skills seen here, especially with almost no traffic signals. Where there are traffic signals there are also traffic cops who occasionally seem to direct traffic but mostly seem just to sit in the traffic cop's box usually on one edge of the intersection. The flow of traffic goes on for an unusually long period of time - especially for a place that has a paucity of same - which means lots of time to check out your neighbors. Businessmen on Hondas. Entire families (up to 6 on one occasion) on a motorbike. Women in sari's or slacks...
...or burkas. A cognitive disconnect on arrival to Hyderabad, a city as rich in Muslim as Hindi history, as we encountered mosques, burkas and calls to prayer, woven into a rich multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious fabric of a different weave than what we'd seen elsewhere.
Looking through the gate from a perch in the Charminar, a 16th century structure built commemorate the elimination of a plague epidemic from the city. A fitting place from which to contemplate the willful ways of bacterial and viral organisms...
Baffled as we were by the apparent contradictions of every place that a place's residents take for granted - e.g. "Of course Santa Claus has many Black [slave] helpers...they're not really slaves, and they get black from the soot in the chimney" or "yes it is America's manifest destiny to expand to the Pacific since God gave this land to us, and the creatures here before us certainly didn't know how to master it" or "Anything created by anyone who is not in strict adherence with [insert world religion here] is the work of infidels and therefore of subhuman status" - more baffling still must be the state of mind induced by observation of epidemic in the ages where epidemiology was still nascent at best. Someone walks into the city from afar, visits, then leaves. Several days later those who came in contact with the visitor become sick. There skin breaks out in horrible lesions. They cough up blood and blackened fluids. the writhe and scream in agony. Gradually much of the population succumbs, to the extent that corpses begin the rot in the streets, families are maddened with fear behind locked doors (no protection from the mosquitoes that make their way in through the openings), and Bacchanal behavior becomes the norm in the dance of death against a nameless killer. Whew! Finally the quarantine prevails or the killing frost or those with the chromosomal error endure and the plague is over. Were you god-fearing before? Well, you likely are now - or at least highly superstitious. Build a beauteous monument in thanks.
[ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charminar]
Olga shot this magnificent photo the upper regions of Golconda Fort, built as a defense mechanism against those damned Invading Moghals From the North in the 14th century. It has a WAY cool acoustical feature: stand in the portico, clap your hands, and the sound is carried to the citadel a km-or-so distant. I find this baffling: seems you would want it the other way around, so if an enemy was approaching, people within would know what was going on without, eh? Cool, nonetheless.
Kali, The Destructor. Painted on a huge boulder outside a temple at the top of the fort.
On religion: the presence of religion is
everywhere yet it didn't have that intrusive sense of the fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumping Bible Belt...or maybe it was little more than a lack of experience. Like the 70's travelers thinking everything about India's religions was
cool, maybe I was doing the same 40 years later. Or maybe it's a matter of how thoroughly woven into the cultural fabric the religion is - like food stands or public restrooms or shops of merchants. And being utterly unfamiliar with the methods of worship and unable to access the interior spaces of the places of worship, I was baffled by the abundance of spiritual artifacts yet a relative absence of practice -e.g. no one approached and asked if we wanted to convert. Final conclusion: I left this place knowing a lot more than when i came but still very little.
Evocative of the
opening scene of Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God." Just so piquantly picturesque. So damnably delicious. Exotic and elegant. Vivacious and voluptuous. A staircase leads downward from the citadel. Always up for not following the beaten path, our 5-hour experience here began with violating the dictates of the travel guide, meandering out to the perimeter wall (though not THE outer perimeter wall, which stretches 11km, but the dinky inner one which goes a mere 3, traipsing up and over the rocky landscape to its southwest apex), and pushing through briars, brush, brambles and decay to the top. It made me realize the sad nature of drugs/stimulants: you can get a mind-blowing experience without additives. Kept pinching myself from the otherworldliness of it all ("This is not a dream!") At five the call to prayers from 6 mosques at lower elevations filled the air. Turn your monitor sideways and
listen...
Olga S at the visual juncture of a castle and a wall.
Also: something of a cognitive disconnect: the religious, cultural and architectural terrain had shifted dramatically from the days in Orissa and Benghal, with a much stronger Arabic/Islamic influence. When the call to prayers reverberated across the landscape, I wondered whether I was in Cairo or Istanbul.
Qutub Shahi Tomb, Hyderabad. Many tombs for many dead sultans. And, occaisonally, their preferred concubines, physicians or commanders.
"Sultan Quli Qutub ul Mulk's tomb, the style of which set the example for the tombs of his descendants, is situated on an elevated terrace measuring 30 m each way. The tomb chamber proper is octagonal, with each side measuring around 10 m. The whole structure is crowned by a circular dome. There are three graves in this tomb chamber and 21 on the terrace outside, all uninscribed, except for the main tomb. The inscription on Sultan Quli's tomb is in three bands, in the Naskh and Tauq scripts. The inscription refers to Sultan Quli as Bade Malik (Great Master) - the endearing term by which all people of the Deccan used to refer to him. The tomb was built in 1543 A.D. by the Sultan, during his lifetime itself, as was the prevalent custom."
The extent of the tombs is impressive...
click here for an aerial view of the grounds.
It seems a good thing to make friends with Death, given its inevitability. What better way than to construct a grand edifice during one's own lifetime? If you've get the genetic continuity dealt with, then with architecture to ensure historical legacy you can be dropped into the crypt with a sense of comfort that your legacy will greatly outlast your body. But gradually trees will start sprouting through the dome of your mausoleum - long after people stop caring who you were or what you did - water will work its way in along with wasps, dogs, rats and monkeys, and eventually the whole thing will cave in. The process of decay in these tombs is sublimely beautiful.
This sort of light-and-dark interplay made its way into many photos, but we narrowed it down to this one.
In the Mortuary Bath an oculus in the ceiling splays light onto upturned features. Not an ordinary bath house, a man-with-daughter informed us, but rather a mortuary where the dead were bathed in rose water and prepped for burial, with loved ones and admirers in attendance.
Some temple slacker.
A black basalt tomb within the mausoleum. A dog nursed here pups behind it.
While in Hyderabad and staying with the parents of Nammu and Neerad an annual exposition was underway, showcasing fabrics. Walking into a 10-acre expanse of vendors, we veered to the left, scrutinized the wares of 3 or 4 stalls, then settled into this one of the Kashmir Selection House, run by 4 brothers.
"
How much of the sale price" you ask yourself "
is making its way into the household of the woman purported to have spent 6 months of her life creating the dazzling piece held before me? And what about the stories I've heard of the children suffering irreparable visual damage from staring intently at the microscopic vagaries of a piece of work in front of them for 14 hours a day and 10 rupees/hr? Am I feeding this exploitation - or sustaining an artform?"
In a different vein you try to get a feel for the vendors, mindful of a balancing act between the desire to possess a piece and what went into its making. In the best possible scenario you not only get something beautiful you love at a good price, but also a set of stories. Ours included several hours of sensory overload, honing in on what was good at first take and what then hold its own on repeated viewings, the purchase of a breathtakingly beautiful shawl of subtle design supposedly crafted over 6 months, Olga's plague of doubt over the price when we arrived home, and, finally, a return trip the next night for an extended bonding session with the brothers, including an invitation to their home in Kashmir.
Last stop:
Kanchipuram, city of temples. The
Kailasanathar Temple, built in the 8th Century C.E.
[what is C.E.?]
The British laid waste to the brightly-colored frescoes of this 7th Century wonder, with a misguided attempt at preservation (as other Euros did at Konarak, completely sealing up the interior) by plastering over the artwork. Once the plaster failed, it peeled off almost all the artwork. Guess it should have been carted off to a museum in London?
The quandary of it all: the preservation debate is more eternal than the artifacts the debate addresses. On the one hand you have well-intentioned historians trying desperately to preserve works in a state of decay; on the other plunderers working for private collections or the glory of the Empire. Here a temple de-sanctioned and set up for preservation status...there another still in use and co-opted and/or coated over by the current religious regime. Here some dynamite, there some industrial effluent. Yet over here a private collector who steals the work away into a private collection, never again to be part of the flow of history other than as a footnote. Somehow this reflection seemed directly relevant to the whole reason we were there in India at all: the issue of ownership of creative products.
With respect to the preservation debate we live in a unique time. It is possible, for example, to use modern chemicals to remove the soot and grime of 5 centuries and examine the Sistine Chapel as it was done. But do we?
"The restorers, by assuming that the artist took a universal approach to the painting, took a universal approach to the restoration. A decision was made that all of the shadowy layer of animal glue and "lamp black", all of the wax, and all of the overpainted areas were contamination of one sort or another: smoke deposits, earlier restoration attempts, and painted definition by later restorers in an attempt to enliven the appearance of the work. Based on this decision, according to Arguimbau's critical reading of the restoration data that has been provided, the chemists of the restoration team decided upon a solvent that would effectively strip the ceiling down to its paint-impregnated plaster. After treatment, only that which was painted "buon fresco" would remain"
So do or can we ever see it as it was executed? And, if so, how is it ever possible - with 5 centuries of ideation - to perceive it in a way in which it was perceived at the time? Simple answer: post-modernism, right? We perceive things within a complex overlay of frameworks, dispensing utterly with an "absolute" sensibility, though we try hard to imagine the context out of which a piece of artwork grew.
What's to be done with a temple or painting or statue that was deconstructed, packed in a box, and re-assembled in a museum of the capital city of one of the European empires? Should it go back to its place of origin? Is there some value in the act of stealing a piece into a private collection, as what happened thousand-fold after the US invasion in 2003 laid bare the collections of Iraq - or should there be an international enforcement body dedicated to finding, collecting and moving artifacts back to their place of origin? Is this any better than collecting specimens from a species tottering on the brink of extinction into a breeding program of a zoo?
I'm not sure what I'm getting at here other than some thoughtfulness regarding preservation and the viewing of artifacts out of context. My brain was rattled by the range of what I was seeing and the disconnect between the circumstances out of which they were created and those in which I dwell. Anyway, on to the next slide.
Inside is a Shiva lingam "The
Lingam (also,
Linga,
Shiva linga,
Sanskrit लिङ्गं
liṅgaṃ, meaning "mark" or "sign") is a representation of the
Hindu deity
Shiva used for worship in
temples.
[1] The Lingam has also been considered a symbol of male creative energy or of the
phallus.
[2][3] The lingam is often represented with the
Yoni, a symbol of the goddess or of
Shakti, female creative energy." This one is translucent.
The Sri Ekambareswarar Temple, Kancheepuram. 59 meters high. Populated with monkeys on its lower levels. populated with stone-throwing boys at lower levels still. Oh the joys of boyhood. And of monkeys having such a fabulous edifice on which to scamper as they dodge the stones thrown by the stone-throwing boys. Oh the song of life.
A few of the temples were brightly pigmented so as with the stark white Greek temples (which were also had a riot of colors) these examples give a much better sense of how they looked when created.
A Wanted Poster, just outside.
In second grade I attended Catholic school in Paris, Illinois, entranced with the antics of my older sister, Ann, who'd made the jump from public schools the year before and waxed eloquently of the beauty and teaching skills of Sister Mary Joyce. Whose breasts I chanced to see one day when she leaned too far forward addressing the student in the desk in front of mine. Why am I telling you this secret? Because the memory of Catholic School was triggered. Some girl (whose name I've forgotten but whose facial expression as she watched my socially-unacceptable antics of smashing handful after handful of cake into my mouth in my first-ever Sugar Rush Experience) is seared forever into the deep, dark recesses of my failing memory as my Princess as she and I ran for The Catholic School Couple of the Year in a fund-raising drive that year. We wandered into a number of the various businesses scattered around the town square and parked large glass jars on the countertops near the cash register. In retrospect I often wondered "What would have made the average Parisienne vote for a 7-year old girl with a smarmy smile and a 7-year old gawky boy who obviously had little if no chemistry going on between them?!
In a similar vein as I contemplated this political ad, I had to wonder "Why on Earth would you possibly vote for any of these candidates?" They seem to represent a cross-sections of thieves, pedophiles, murderers, wife-beaters and baby bangers!" Then I shut my pie hole tight and, with all the sad liberal inclinations to which I seem either pre-disposed or genetically-inclined, chalked my murky thoughts up to cultural ignorance. But still...these guys look pretty creepy.
Making an appearance with suprisedly unadorned horns, this Brahma cow stakes out an artistic pose nonetheless in Konchi before some wall art. During festivals their horns are generally adorned with painted designs. This one has not.
How I Knew I Was Not A Geek: We landed in Chennai at 10am, stashed our luggage, caught a train, boarded a bus, went 75km to Konchipuri, dined on cafeteria food, argued with insistent rickshaw drivers, made our way into temples, looked at toe rings, interacted with monkeys, befriended a doctor on the nighttime bus back to the city, had an anniversary dinner at another branch of the hotel we stayed in at the beginning of the trip (for the sake of symmetry), and finally meandered back to the airport after midnight. A true geek would have remained in the airport on wireless all day. A woman and her son, blanketed with her sari, on the bus back to Chennai.
