Four months in India
Well, that was a mammoth trip traveling around Sri Lanka for one month then India for four months on a motorbike. If you have visions of the exotic, romantic mountain panoramas, Margaret Kaye’s, ‘Far Pavilions’, temple chanting, elephants, gurus and white Goan sand, our journey was, mostly, not that.
The most scenic, ancient, spiritual places, tend to attract tourism where the interaction dynamic with local’s is tainted by you being their income. A hammed-up version of India, pushing its cultural traditions. The Indians pressure to sell a thing or experience combined with the tourist’s dismissive refusal can lead to a very warped sense of Indian culture/hospitality. These hot spots are coated in a surprisingly thin veil of this attitude, move as little as 2kms outside and you are in the vast, ‘rest of India,’ where you find the incredibly humbling style of Indian hospitality, Atithi Devo Bhava (guests are Gods) and the authentic rituals, embedded into everyday life. No foreigners from one week to the next with locals confused by why you want to visit these places and not the temples, the Taj Mahal. Being on the back of a motorbike offers the freedom and privilege to seek out these everyday places.
This blog is not about the details of our route which you can find on the link to my polarsteps if that is what you are keen to see. https://www.polarsteps.com/DeborahBowditch/24092337-a-new-adventure?s=81fc1207-412a-4909-a1d2-8f247428e87a
This is more about the mental journey that led me towards the decision concerning my next art project. I asked myself, what am I going to paint about? I am not a painter who travels and returns to paint beautiful scenes of India. What do I have to offer that gives the viewer a valuable experience? I am no expert on India, who am I to think that I can talk about it in paint? Yet it is the fact that I am a visitor, I have left my habitual surrounding’s ingrained in daily repetition, I am here with a heightened sense of perception observing, like a child seeing something for the first time yet with life experience of an adult as a benchmark to view the similarities and differences along the road. This is the thing that excites me, when I look back at my art career, the projects, renditions of my artist statements where I have been described as a beachcomber, a flaneur, observer, this is my area of expertise and this was my focus whilst on the back of the bike. Just like sitting in a large window at the best café for watching people pass by, except I am the one that is moving.
We ride slowly, my husband is ex motocross and loves the challenge of roads that resemble goat tracks where we can find ourselves at dead ends, having lunch with watermelon farmers, on the banks of a delta watching camels carting sand up from the riverbed. Much of our time was spent on these small roads/ lesser known places both city and rural. We would set off early to avoid the heat, observing morning rituals. Life in India can be brutal and luxury unheard of, these people will adapt and survive whilst we are busy complaining to the council! We only take the highways for reasons such as covering distance between accommodation opportunities which, for the most part, are as basic as I will go. Best to never look too closely.
I started to draw upon ideas, looking at common threads, differences between the states that we covered, taking snapshots as we rode, understandably blurred and wonky,, at times it’s not until I zoom in that I see something interesting. When we stop at the end of the day, I make notes, draw and paint. Watercolour is so not my forte, the results are frequently tragic but it’s more convenient than oil so I need to get over myself and improve.
So many ideas crossed my mind:
Morning water rituals and cow pat production shapes used to both fuel, fertilise and export. It’s everywhere but the shape and means of stacking varies from state to state.
Cloth. Body covering dhoti’s, turbans, sari’s, shrouds for the dead. Drying, dyeing, folding, all to be seen out from the back of the bike.
The changing light, the difference between the softer muted orange hues of Western Ghats, the Naples Yellow of the desert in Gujarat. My phone camera cannot capture the subtleties and there is no room for extra baggage in a panier so you commit to memory, paint or gather. What is that mist? is it morning fog, low cloud, burning, dust or pollution that leaves a brownish purple streak.
The different bells and chants that identify what you are collecting or selling.
Indian tree pollarding, a brutal ripping off branches for firewood, far from a carefully curated European prune.
I even considered just focusing on the Indian Pond Heron, I became so obsessed with this unassuming little bird. It’s quiet patience waiting for a catch. Brown and flecked feathers when perching that unfolded into bright white in flight.
Pond Heron in Varanasi
All these ideas then the most obvious fell into place. Observations from the road of the life lived by the people on the verge, verge being those that actually live there. The various levels of transience from seasonal tent camps to the rural farm workers who live in the seams between the field and the road, less transient but built with a level of impermanence, mud and lath or bricks with no cement. There is a lack of ownership from rural to the city outskirts and pavement dwellers with their possessions, work tools in a box, on a trolley under a polythene square. I am not coming from a place of sympathy, more an observation on how it’s done.
The current plan is that these paintings, as opposed to being scenes of the road side, will unfold as an interplay between the experience of being there, life as it unfolded and the paint and tools I use to present this case to the world.
So far I have stapled lengths of Khadi cloth woven in Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad and started painting. I have a collection of super fime stone dust dumped on the side of the road by quarry trucks and have purchased a beautiful glass muller to make my own paint and I am very excited about that.