Of idyllic landscapes and slow boats on the Ganges

Of idyllic landscapes and slow boats on the Ganges, a set on Flickr.

Inspired by Paul Robeson’s Ol’ Man Mississippi, the late Bhupen Hazarika’s most famous legacy is his ballad to the Ganga as being a faithful observer to the paradigmatic changes that take place around it and about it. His passionate appeal to the Ganga to not remain a static observer to the degradation of humanity around it engenders a pathos to the idea of this might river. But the Ganga is no mere observer, as many would argue, that rivers have an organic economy of their own that come into being in the interaction of people around the river with it.

Of idyllic landscapes and slow boats on the Ganges

a few boats for fishing

Inspired by Paul Robeson’s Ol’ Man Mississippi, the late Bhupen Hazarika’s most famous legacy is his ballad to the Ganga as being a faithful observer to the paradigmatic changes that take place around it and about it. His passionate appeal to the Ganga to not remain a static observer to the degradation of humanity around it engenders a pathos to the idea of this might river. But the Ganga is no mere observer, as many would argue, that rivers have an organic economy of their own that come into being in the interaction of people around the river with it. This relation often serves to keep the sustainability and coexistence of man with nature within the horizons of the people whose lives depend on the river. Sailing down the length of the Ganga is one way of discovering what it means to live with the river and depend on it for livelihood for years and yet repeatedly find newer facets to its unparalleled beauty.

Beginning from Sitamarhi, near the Prayag at Allahabad, there is a noticeable calmness to the river as we set sail towards the famed meeting point of the Ganga and the Yamuna. The water bears the distinct difference in colour as the soft brown of the Yamuna seems to melt into the thick blue of the Ganga. Devotees take their ritualistic dips and my shutterbug hands are abuzz in the early morning sun. The river offers many beautiful sights to capture, all of which seem to be ensconced within a heavy silence. This reverie breaks as the boat nears any local ghat or other sets of habitations but as the boats meander through the spine of the river, it is the silence of one’s own surrounding that marks a great distance with the madding crowd. 

local sights of Bitthauli

We stop at Bitthauli ghat once to have a look at the local markets and the daily humdrum of a riverside village. Boatmen, fishermen and fisherwomen move in and out of the narrow lanes, stopping at the ghat for some work or the other. Ferries transport people from one bank to the other and rickshaws queued up call out to them loudly. Subdued vitality greets one at the entrance of the fishing village. Customers like their bargains as much as they like their fish and a quick snack while you breathe it all in makes this stop worthwhile.

We travel in one boat while a kitchen boat follows in its wake. Equipped with mattresses, a gas cylinder and a cooking stove, the boat is minimalistic and palatable for the simple traveller. As the day unfolds, the river grows increasingly broad and equally silent, allowing the call of white gulls and the drone of the boat to lull me into sleep. One look around though, makes one sharply aware of the lack of the famous Gangetic River Dolphin, referred to by many colloquial terms, the most common of them being ‘shushuk’. This one species has perhaps been the worst affected by the kind of industrial growth around the river. Polluting factories are known to dump industrial waste without strong pollution checks into the body of the river. Add to that the annual round of Hindu festivals and the daily ritualistic practices at holy Hindu sites like Varanasi and Allahabad that contribute massive amounts of ash, wood, dead organic substances as well as untreated human waste leading to rapid degradation of freshwater life in the Ganga. 

Besides the fall in population of the dolphin due to deaths, the other reason for fewer dolphins is their gradual movement away from the main river body in to smaller tributaries and distributaries. But they face many threats there as well since these are muddy patches with lesser water flow and the risks of getting caught by fishermen is quite high. News reports of dolphins washed up along smaller river banks were not rare in the last few years but were mostly ignored by state authorities.

sunset from the Chunar Fort

These thoughts are pleasantly interrupted by the arrival at Chunar fort. The fort has a tempestuous history – a site of rebellion as well as authority given that it is positioned close to where the Ganga turns southward to continue to its delta. The fort served as a crucial river port and an important frontier location for the Mughal Empire as well as its contemporary rulers such as Sher Shah and Hemu and subsequently went on to become an East India Company holding under William Hastings. The fort’s wide hallways and wells grab my attention and as I walk past stone railings, I can’t help but notice the elaborate network of staircases within the fort. The Ganga flows past the walls of the fort and when the boat pushes back into the river, the boldness of stone architecture again gives way to the silence of the river.

We camp on riverine islands near Chunar, resembling large sand banks which are largely uninhabited. These are mostly resting points fishing boats which stay overnight in the river. The boatman’s wise quips about this river’s multifarious stories and the smell of cooking from the kitchen boat fill up the void left by the milling crowds of Chunar and the world beyond. The fish our boatman caught in the river, all fresh, has now been nicely cooked and adequately relished. By nightfall, from inside our small pitched tents, the river doesn’t look like one anymore. It feels more gigantic, more sea-like. And it is with that image that one can tuck in, the rising tide gently pushing up the nearest bank.

the Ramnagar Fort near Varanasi

The morning is a far cry from the dewy sunlit ones back home. I see the vast expanse of the river island in front of me and the sun at its other end, staring me in the eyes. The Ganga mildly dazzles in the reflected rays of the yellow sun and after munching on some quick breakfast and a visit to the “washroom tent”, we head on to Ramnagar. We reach the Ramnagar fort by early afternoon after some comfortable sailing and this time, a busier ghat awaits us. Home to the royal family of Varanasi, the massive sandstone structure looks intimidating against the bottle green of the river. An afternoon stroll through the lawns of the riverside fort followed by a quiet seat next to the ghat while the evening aarti takes place, a few minutes away from the hustle of the Varanasi ghats, and there is sense of completeness to this river ride. Pottery markets and other craft markets are abundant in the area and a lengthy effort at finding the best in there is what must follow such an invigorating experience.

All about Pietra Dur

the one and only

The Taj Mahal’s resplendence has its admirers the world over. Every year, hordes of people descend upon the city of Agra to sample its finest offering, diving into tales three centuries old and living the beauty of the complex architectural achievements of the past. Tour guides in Agra frequently draw out the story of remembrance and loss in the seventeenth century Mughal dynasty that underlies this famous mausoleum. 

But it is in the by-lanes away from the Taj that one finds a close-knit set of workshops specifically for creating artworks modelled around the composite pietra dura style that makes the Taj such an artistic wonder. By defninition, this form of art requires working with hard stone and carving from scratch and by the sixteenth century in south Asia, ‘stone’ had come to mean marble, granite and precious stones. Originally Italian in form, the style of careful and sustainable inlay work work has passed through several transformations and every artistic hub of pietra dura work has its own singularities. In Agra the specific unique elements derive from a composite influence of Persian and Turkish architectural styles mixed with masonry from the upper Ganges delta which has worked for centuries now, spawning a whole market and production cycle for such marble work. White marble mines, abundant around Agra and otherwise sourced from neighbouring Rajasthan [see Makrana, Rajasthan] provide the raw material for the industry. 

Pietra Dura work done in italy

From Rome and Florence in the sixteenth century, the art form was mostly restricted to royal culture and luxurious commodities which were mostly gifted amongst nobility and hardly ever placed in public display. With the Taj, one sees a fabulous display of the art and craft of the pietra dura tradition, courtesy Shah Jahan and his 22,000 strong workforce led by famous Persian and Turkish architects. It is argued frequently, both in tourist books as well as by word of mouth in Agra, though historical work is scat in this regard, that most of the marble workers in Agra today are descendants of the original settling artisans who worked on the Taj.

Be that as it may, it is significant to know that in Agra per se, the methods of inlay work and styles of stone cutting have in fact not changed much. Parchinkari’s [the local word for pietra dura art] main processes consists of four crucial people – the Chaklawaala, the Ustad Fanahkaar, the Ghisaiyya and the Bharaiyya. The Chaklawaala is responsible for procuring marble and cutting it into usable slabs using his tools. It is with the Ustad or master that the process of inlay begins. The Ustad makes the designs, works with stencils and passes them on to the Ghisaiyya who is then tasked with the polishing of the stone, the carving out of inlay designs and other such things. The process ends with the Bharaiyya who performs the inlay as directed by the Ustad and lays the adhesion into proper place. The adhesive is a general mixture of wax, oil and lead oxide.

semi-precious stones against the grindwheel for the perfect shape

These techniques have lasted in the region for a very long time now and continue to rely, for most part, on the work of hands and not mechanised processes. The designs are so intricate that they may even take days to finish miniature animal statuettes. It is only in the recent past that these workers have got their due and seen gradual increases in market prices for their products. Since the craft itself requires a vast amount of experience, the apprenticeship period and the subsequent acclimatisation with the professional work routine often takes more than a decade. Simply working with an iron chisel under a Fanahkaar can take up to twelve years to master and even then, there are significant standards of creativity and excellence that different workshops compete over.

Precious and semi-precious stones and gems are crucial to the craft. The list includes lapis lazuli, malachite, cornelian, jasper, agnate, coral, turquoise and many others which are either acquired domestically or sometimes imported. The emery wheel or the chakla, as used by the chaklawaala, is what shapes and polishes the stones in order to bring out the required aesthetic qualities in them such as dispersion of light, radiance values and other such things.

the finished product

The work of the Bharaiyya can often be the most decisive component as the symmetry and polish of the final product mostly depends on his expert eyes and hands. He relies both on his skill independently as well as the original stencil or stain sheet created by the Ustad Fanahkaar which help in providing distinctive touches to the final product and make both the designer and the craftsman equally essential in the making of the finest Parchinkaari work.

While in recent times, exports of the marble products of Agra such as plates, boxes, decorative trays, paperweights and coasters have indeed seen some rise, the general life and everydayness of these workers and their workshops remains less considered. It is a most unique experience to spend a day simply discovering the inner practices of these workshops, giving special attention to those which do not have a lot of machines or mechanised production in order to see the way it is “really” done.

Travelling through Kipling's India

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 Dec 1865 - 18 Jan 1936)

The youngest Nobel laureate in Literature found inspiration for his creativity in the wildlife and the aesthetics of the colonial geography of British Asia. Torn between his sense of belonging to both the “civilised” empire of upper class English values and the “natural” aura of the colonised jungles of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency, his fiction represents this dual presence. His characters, such as Mowgli and Kim, travel from the one location to the other and face journeys of discovery and loss much like he personally did. The idea of family and the sense of the ‘familiar’ that is lost as both Mowgli and Kim move away from the jungle or the streets of Lahore is perhaps his own life’s story enacted through his oeuvre in verse. To understand Kipling and to relive his life in Bombay or Pench or Shimla requires us to place his own life in the context of the time in which he lived and wrote. Kipling’s imagination, like that of many who shared his background, was constrained within the logic of colonialism in such a way that it articulated the need to stay together as a family under the head of the British Empire through different characters and plots. The colonies in South Asia were often referred to as the most prized possessions in the British Empire, the “jewel in the crown” as it were, and the recurring sense of family and the familiar within the relations of the English and all the different colonised people exhibits the same frame of thinking.

So what makes Kipling worth re-living and re-reading? What makes his journeys so attractive? Is it just his narrative style or is there more to it? It would be common sense to say that to love a writer’s work, one must also know the time that the writer lived in and wrote about. What made up the writer’s imaginative repertoire is what makes the trip from Bombay to Shimla via Pench the most spectacular one for any lover of Kipling’s writing. To know Kipling’s time and his inspiration, it would not suffice to simply read Charles Allen, Charles Carrington or Zohreh Sullivan. All these writers on Kipling present a vivid insight into his craft but there is great sensory nutrition to be imbibed when one simply steps out onto somewhat familiar journeys pretending to follow Kipling himself.

The Dean's Bungalow at the JJ School of Art

The lush green lawns provide a mellow contrast to the pale green that is the facade of Kipling’s home in Bombay. This is otherwise also the site of the reputed J.J. Institute of Applied Art and it is a lesser known fact that Rudyard’s father was in fact the Institute’s first dean. The house holds many great pieces of art that have emanated from the classrooms of the Institute and are a pleasure to go through. While I try and capture with my lens, the myriad ways in which the grounds of the Institute must have changed from the time when Kipling ran across the lawns, I am also filled with a curiosity for what he felt when he was forced to leave for England at the age of five and the pleasure of a unique rediscovery as he returned to Lahore and then came back to Bombay.

The idea of rediscovery is what I’m working with as well. And from Bombay, the road really leads to the very familiar Jungle, or the Pench National Park. Then situated conveniently on the rail line between Bombay and Nagpur, Pench was a more accessible retreat as opposed to the other forest areas of Kanha and Bandhavgarh. This meant that many a known colonial ethnographer, geographer, writer, official and explorer went to Pench. Names like Captain Forsyth and R.A Strendale were often reminiscing about the beauties of this deep forest reserve. Albeit with the colonising mission on their shoulders as they romanticised and typified the “exotic” component of the forests, it is difficult to deny that their descriptions and narratives helped foster a deeper discussion about the forest life and the lives of people dependent upon the forest in the colonial period. 

 

A tigress and her cubs at the Pench National Park

Pench, located at the edge of the Satpura range, is a veritable feast for wildlife lovers. Tiger sightings are somewhat rare but the lucky traveller might just get to capture the beauty of that feared Asian cat. On most days, any visitor would catch the Indian Bison, the Cheetal, and the auburn Wild Dog. Leopards are known to visit some of the shadier spots in the day and often compete with wolves for prey. A variety of smaller animals like the chinkara and the jackal are common sightings. It also happens to be one of the only spots in India today that is home to the endangered vulture species – the king vulture, white-rump vulture, long-billed vulture and the white scavenger vulture.

Sadly, forest lovers often complain that resorts have encroached into forest land more than they should have and this often deters animals from venturing into the open spaces in the forest. It is also true that Pench is less promoted by the state’s tourism department in comparison that done by the neighbouring states which are promoting Kanha and Bandhavgarh even though Pench is one important edge of the whole wildlife corridor in what Forsyth called the “Central Indian Highlands”. Pench offers any lay visitor like me, even today, the same sense of tranquillity that Kipling describes of the Jungle. The fear and the rush of the wild is almost palpable at dusk as the jeep safaris softly roll back.

The toy train in Shimla

But Pench can only satisfy one voice of the many in my head that seek to re live Kipling’s journey. One could go to Calcutta or to Ahmedabad or to Lahore and still not be satisfied. But perhaps, in order to capture a tiny glimpse into the Kipling of the 1880s when he wasn’t writing fiction but was simply narrating his gaze of the hills and the colonial summer retreat and truly living up to the classic English moorings, Shimla holds much promise. From Shimla, in the early part of his return to the Crown colony, he regularly wrote for newspapers which finally resulted in a collection of stories titled Plain Tales from the Hills and it is in this search of Kipling that Shimla becomes the last stop on my trip.

The busy capital town of the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, Shimla is quite a popular tourist location and hence sees its fair share of noise, environmental degradation and congestion. Nonetheless, for any inquisitive traveller, Shimla offers a lot. Its most peaceful treat is the evening and the hue of the sunset that accompanies long walks along its famous winding roads. To imagine Kipling’s descriptions of fireplaces and cold mornings away from the heat of the plains, Shimla lets its guests have ample time and ample space. Shimla is, at once, the soothing feel of mountain air rushing into your lungs as well as the satisfying pleasure of letting your love for Kipling go as wild as the swaying deodars in the night.

This journey is a treat to oneself that needs to be made, just so you know Kipling a tad bit better.