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Right to Home: Field Notes from Ladakh
‘Right to Home’, a recent project conceived and executed by the young artist Koumudi Patil for the children of Tibetan Refugees at Ladakh provided the participating artists with a few eye openers. The project was an art and media workshop that aspired to give the children tools of visual grammar and media skills. Koumudi Patil reports from Ladakh.
- Where are you from?
Children- Ladakh
- Where is ladakh?
Children- Ladakh Tibet ke paas hai
- Tibet kahan hai? (Where is Tibet?)
Children- Near India and Near China, but Hindustani and Chinese –very dangerous
- Oh really! and are Tibetans very safe?
After a small tête-à-tête the children conclude that it is the Chinese and Pakistani that are dangerous.
- Why is Pakistani dangerous?
Children- Pakistan kill Indian man
- And doesn’t Indian man kill Pakistani man?
Children- but Indian man helps others…
- And what about Tibetans?
Children- Tibetans very simple and don't fight.
- But just a while ago those two friends were rolling on the ground hitting each other in the dust. So Tibetans do fight.
Children- Tibetans fight but do not kill.
- So fighting is not dangerous but killing is.
Children- Yes
- Then, Tibetan fighting is not dangerous but Chinese is?
Children- Yes because Chinese have gun and bomb… they kill…..
This is how our introductory session with some 6-10 years old Tibetan refugee children began for the ‘Right to home’ project. After a few hours some teenagers also joined us. This group of about 40 children was to be with us for 7 days in an art and media workshop at Choglamsar, a quaint little town with more Tibetans than Ladakhis near Leh. The ‘Right to home’ project was held in the Tibetan children’s village for refugee kids from 7th July to 14th July. The project was an art and media workshop that aspired to give the children tools of visual grammar and media skills to not only draw sculpt or animate but also to use art as a therapy and a means to become articulate about their rights, needs and desires. The documentation of this workshop will be translated into multi media works to be displayed as inserts in multiplexes and cable network. These media works will explore the collaboration of art with advertisement techniques in information dissemination and building marketing strategies for dissemination of the plural voices.
This art and media workshop explored the connection of Tibetan ritual and cultural practices with formal education in an attempt to create a vernacular curriculum of practice. The exploration of the ritual as an articulation of a thought process was easier for the children to associate with, considering the similarities in the underlying patterns of the structure. The sessions attempted to introduce art as something with which they were already familiar with and practice or see on an everyday basis, rather than introduce another formal subject of study. In a span of 7 days we worked with the children on visual grammar, story boards, claymation, photography, architecture planning and land art.
The terrain of Ladakh was chose for specific reasons. This terrain is very close to the terrain of Tibet both physically and culturally. As the workshop was based on the theme of home, it was only apt to choose a site that resembles Tibet, the most Ladakh was also a deliberate decision in support of the artistic need of the use of Kilkhors as land art. The sepia terrain helped in the easy visibility of the concluding work of line drawings made with chalk power. The empty brown spaces enhanced the power of the images the children made. The schools in other parts of the country either had very less space around for us to work, or the urban setting was too cluttered for a clear outcome. The segregation of these refugees from the rest of the country also made it important to work with them rather than elsewhere.
Choglamsar, is one of the 12 refugee camps of the Tibetans in Leh. What distinguishes the place from an Indian town is not the little white houses but the sky instead. Each house holds strings of prayer flags of blue, white, red green and yellow, all trying to flutter a little harder than its neighbor. Religion seems to have seeped into the very existence of being here. Walking on the main road you will be suddenly asked to change your course and enter the kaccha mud path. With the first turn you realize why. Prayer wheels made up of used tins have been placed in between the walls. Moving each wheel clockwise helps in spreading world peace. In our 7 days of stay we realized that changing course to accommodate the 'other' whether the secular or the profane seemed to be a normal custom here.
The children here are yet to be touched by life. This is the third generation of Tibetans much like the later generations of independent India, who experienced freedom but not the struggle. The grandparents of these children fled from Tibet in 1959, in the aftermath of the genocide perpetrated by the Chinese, with nothing but a prayer book and their children. When they reached India they joined the massive road building exercise of the Border road organization with a daily wage of 2 rupees for men and 75 paisa for the women. The children were left at the newly built school for the refugees at Dharmashala. In the school the children got one school dress every year and one Sunlight soap and washing soap every month besides food and books. The elders today love recounting tales of how they would sell half the Sunlight soap to the Lalaji to see a movie at the local theater. Today these children of the Sunlight soap days have risen to key positions in society with 'yellow passports' in their hands, which means that your every move from one place to another is recorded officially besides renewed identification processes every six months.
The parents of the children with whom we worked, have faint memories of Tibet and their flight to India. Everything else they know is through word of mouth. And their children in turn will never fail to tell you that besides grandmothers bed time stories, it is also the Television through which they know the history of Tibet and understand why 'Chinese is danger'. Their notion of Tibet is romantic and fantastical. Tibet in their mind is a dream place- a land of honey and milk. But amidst all these delusions and confusions, they instinctively believe that the nature of their ‘fight’ for Tibet is different. They are unable to articulate this difference but their faith in this difference is unflinching. It is this difference that they try to convey when they say that Tibetans are simple and don't fight.
A lack of identity in an alien land does not seem to bother the children in the least. I believe that circumstances have been easier because of the cultural similarities between Tibet and the terrain of Ladakh. Ladakh has often been called the Mini Tibet. The children seem to have almost forgotten their lineage of nomadic life in midst of the comfort of a terrain that's almost like their own land. This comfort was well reflected in their non-pulsed faces when they scratched their heads to think of 5 things that they will take with them if they have to leave Ladakh forever. These exercises in imaging their present initiated them to record their own life and in the process become aware of objects that are important and dear to them. It also helped them to map similarities between their home and school and later visualize the same for Tibet and Leh. The camera was introduced to them with the view of documenting this map of their life. Sessions in composition making and technical know-how of the camera introduced the children to photography. The children first photographed a series of practical necessities such as the ‘yellow’ passport, a pillow, the horse, dal, chawal and so on. It is only after such ‘worldly considerations’ had been satisfied that one could be probed into subtler aspects. It is in the concluding days that the children thought of the photograph of their mother for memory, of his holiness, the prayer book, their dog and the football. By the end of the 7th day, left to themselves, their composition skills in photography were admirable.
Every discussion with these children can inevitably reach at their much loved slogans of Free Tibet. The fact that the discussion did not reach a conclusion then becomes immaterial to them. There love for these slogans cost me the entire set design exercise for the Clayamation session. They insisted on putting the Free Tibet slogan right in the middle of the set of a story of a homeless snake which had nothing to do with their freedom struggle. They penned down the story of a homeless snake in search of a house. He went to the water to search for a home. But he could not swim and came out. He asked the air if he could stay in it. But he could not fly and fell down. Disappointed he went into the jungle. But there he found a mongoose. He got frightened and ran away. Then he found a hole and went underground and that’s where he stays.
Right in between the serene landscape that they had created to enact the claymation of this story, their slogan of ‘Free Tibet’ jarred out. My frequent removal of the slogan from the set only made them more vehement about its existence on the set, and it was dug deeper and deeper into the soil, until I learnt to appreciate the beauty of the set with it. In the claymation exercise the stories were translated into a story board, where children learnt to establish the main frames. It was then followed by set designing, understanding persistence of vision, camera, voice over and music. Their first claymation is around 1mintues 45 seconds long…..
The mention of home hardly evokes any response from the children. They seem to have substituted the word Tibet for the word home. But the traditional process of building houses in Tibet interested them. Slides of the Leh palace to explain the building techniques helped further. Introduction of elevation drawings to make the plan of their own house was easy to explain, because two dimensional thinking stems naturally from their cultural praxis. The exercises initiated them to make elevations of their home following the design process and material constraints. All elevations designed by the children included a hall entrance, a prayer room and a dog house. It was amusing to see them collecting blankets, chadars, cardboard boxes and stealing the same from the other groups to build these houses. But most children love the Maikhans (the traditional tents used by the nomadic Tibetans) much more than concrete houses. As they put it, in the tents you can hear the sounds of the dog, yak and the wind….the concrete houses hardly allow such pleasures.
I should not fail to mention my own romantic notions about the place and these children before I left from Delhi with a team of three people, Jyoti Patil, a Pune based documentary film maker, Anil Dayanand, a Performance artist from Delhi and Subbramanyam T, a Photographer from Bangalore. My understanding of these children and that of Tibetans in general was based on books I was reading, net surfing, Buddha vihar and discussions with my Tibetan friends. My idea about these children was of Sunlight soaps and refugee tents. This vision was slowly crumbling by the second day of the workshop. But the lightening finally struck during the third session, when in my free time I was interviewing Tenzing. After I had exhausted my question bank, Tenzing stood up and said “aab meri baari" (Now it’s my turn). "I will also interview you." This question was not something I had planned for in any of the sessions. Though stunned I decided to give it a chance. After teaching him the basics of video camera handling I sat down to be interviewed. Tenzing asked me all sorts of questions from what I think about Tibet to my mother’s age. He even found time to console me on the fact that we three sisters don't have a brother. But sitting in front of the camera, the world changed. Suddenly, I was not the intruder or the spectator but the object to be viewed and examined and sympathized with. This was my first humbling experience during the workshop, beyond which I unconditionally accepted the children with their televisions, football mania, fascination for Delhi and the Bollywood fan club.
During the sessions we realized that their culture inculcates in them some essential ways of perceiving things that have to be taught to us in an academy. Seeing the basic forms in nature either to arrive at simplicity or to realize the building blocks of existence was a rigorous academic exercise that I have gone through during my BFA. But these children could see a Buddha’s figure in a triangle without being prompted to. Their association of a vertical line with happiness or a diagonal line with dynamism are seeing patterns that I have acquired over years of formal study.
Though, this same ‘seeing’ through ‘knowing’ made them hesitant to draw what they felt. Even though the context of the kilkhor (this is a sand mandala more commonly known as a kalachakra. It is a tool for meditation and wish fulfillment. The intricate design takes months to complete and is destroyed immediately after completion) had changed during the last session, the children drew on what they knew was drawn in a kilkhor, rather than create their own forms taking advantage of the freedom given. One is caught in-between the dilemma of preserving what they ‘know’ in an alien land or to replenish the tradition with the arising new contexts.
Children drew large Kilkhors with chalk powder on a nearby mountain plateau on the theme of peace which was decided by collective consent Kilkhors were the conclusion of the mind mapping exercises that the children were doing during the last six days. These mind mapping exercises of discussions, drawings, photographs, constructions and destructions were an attempt to draw the children to think, understand and map out the components of their own life. As per the ritual of Kilkhor, these drawings of chalk powder were destroyed by the children themselves as an extension of the Buddhist belief of detachment and harmony with nature. But as Buddha says, salvation does not come from the sight of me. It demands strenuous effort and practice. So even though the children are growing in a religion where detachment is believed to be the cause of suffering, it was difficult for them to detach themselves from their creation. Many did not want to destroy the drawing inspite of knowing that peace will never be established in Tibet or the world unless the drawing is offered to the forces of nature.
…....left without an argument, they did relent in the end.
Life here is woven with myths and modern facts, and you can hardly realize where one ends and the other begins…a magical realism that draws you within.
I was inquisitive to know whether a snow lion, actually existed.
-Does a snow lion really exist?
- Oh yes it does. It's a very small animal unlike the real lion but pure white in color. It stays in very high mountains in Tibet and is very rare. People who see a snow lion are considered very lucky by us.…..
- Oh really, so it’s not a mythical animal like the dragon…
-No no… It’s not a mythical animal at all. It exists in the high mountains. In fact a dragon is also not a myth. Long ago it did exist on earth…….
Now it was time for us to be left without any arguments. In their Macondo, however everything seems real and one can nothing but hum the tune of ‘we shall overcome’.
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