It could have been anywhere
Why Bihar? Asking the person who is not from Bihar...
This is the fourth in a series of articles within the Ghumakkadi project. If you haven’t been following the series, please read the first, second and third article for more context.
Picking up from where we left off-route to sleep in the nearest town rather than the village for a variety of reasons. Including the fact that we arrived after hours for a village to unsuspiciously host two strangers. We began walking south towards Gandak to try our luck this time. We passed by the usual stares of curiosity, from animals and their humans, a shaking guava tree dropping egg sized snails on the ground, to an opening on the left side of the road where a frail old person was unassumingly hacking off at long stalks of hathighas (Napier grass). Behind him stood a magnificent banyan tree. “It's a holy place,” the priest walked towards us as I excitedly pointed out and Shridhar started shooting the tree with his camera, “this is an old tree”. Two people who were threshing the grass informed me that the old person is deaf, so he couldn't answer any questions I asked. One of them claimed that this has been standing for at least 6 human generations. When I took out my camera to shoot it from a different angle, they asked me if I was the engineer who wants to cut off the tree to make a highway. I assured them that we were just random tree enthusiasts who like walking across rural Bihar to create content on the internet for people to read. I wish I knew more about trees.
Wait, let me take the chance to introduce myself here, Shridhar read a draft of this and asked me to introduce myself somewhere. I'm Leo, 29 years old, I don't specifically conform to any normative standards of gender expression. I have worked mostly as a photographer and sometimes as a filmmaker. Also, I never finished my college education and have been trying to make something out of myself in visual arts or the content industry. And I've been working with Buddhijeev for almost 2 years now as a researcher, writer, educator, cameraperson, and an editor in limited ways. I recently tagged along on a walk across rural Bihar primarily because of Shridhar's interest in understanding, and documenting rural Bihar, but personally out of curiosity towards this process of documentation. So, I didn't really mind where and what we were documenting as such. I've always been interested in documentary filmmaking, and I love learning new things about this practice.
Since I am an alien looking creature in the middle of rural Bihar; I have a full beard, long hair, I sport a septum piercing, funky coloured frames on my spectacles, and I spoke a radically different dialect of Hindi; I stuck out like a sore thumb. And it would be unfair of me to expect anyone to not point out my appearance, which somehow became my icebreaker to start conversations. We had been documenting rural Bihar while travelling on foot, an experiment in slow travel, as Shridhar likes to call it. But I love to find the humour in it being seen as the tomfoolery of urban folks in rural spaces. I have some experience in documenting/shooting in spaces where we don't know the language, or we are primarily looked as outsiders, but this was my first time walking all the time, as a principle, we weren't hiking across, or trying to find the easiest or the cheapest way to travel, we were walking. And this changes the gaze with which you look at things. We are still outsiders, but by positioning ourselves at such a leisurely pace we open ourselves to their gaze at us, hence we are often met with the vulnerability of the people we are subjecting our obtrusion to in their otherwise normal daily life. Our presence walking through the city would never gather such curiosity as it did in a rural area, and that has to be acknowledged.
Before this major tree of a distraction and before we had to pause our usual routine of staying over at a village for the night. We were on a path around a bamboo grove outside a village near a pond around afternoon, when the sun makes it too hot for us to walk, we take a break for two hours. We spread out our foam mattresses on dried grass and twigs. And tried to sleep. I was watching The Owl House on my phone. I look up to see five kids, one pair stacked on top of each other while the other three followed suit, staring at us, from outside the bamboo grove. So, I wave at them. Some of them smile and don't respond, the youngest one perched on top of the oldest one had the most intense gaze pointed at us, she didn't even smile. Hence, I got back to my phone. After a few moments, from the corner of my eye, I could see some movement, I look up to see the five have entered the grove and are still staring at us. I ask them their names, and I forgot noting them down, neither do I have an image of them. Because when I asked why they were staring at us, and if they wanted to ask us something, they all just ran off into the fields. But it's still as vivid as if it happened yesterday. An adult, who was a witness to this encounter from the sidelines, laughed with me as they ran off and just said, “It's kids being curious, you sleep.” The ‘you sleep’ part of it rather barked at me like an order than a suggestion for me to continue with my leisure.
The point of regaling these encounters with trees and kids is not rooted in any agenda to establish what Bihar is about or the culture is like for me at all. Basic research would direct us towards its rich history, its contributions to three major religions of the world (Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism). We are constantly reminded about it being the centre of power, with Patna (erstwhile Patliputra) serving as the capital for a major chunk of this subcontinent. We read about it as the birthplace of Gandhi's movements for independence from the British. And now we know it as the state which is known for it's rather vibrant cinema and a huge working class population, which works as migrant labour across the country, if not the world. But these are not the things I’m going to talk about. I was interested in the art I’d encounter, the cuisine we’d get to eat, the songs we’d listen to, and the dances we’d witness. Since our process was to walk, and meet people along the way, we couldn’t really go out of our way to meet artists even if somebody had mentioned them. It had to be by chance that we get to encounter any of those. And hence every artist that we did get to meet would be detailed out about in at least a blog post each in the future. But for now, one probably has to make do with this part travelogue, part diary entry, part blogpost, train wreck of an article.
Here’s some art on the walls of northwest Bihar, though. For your eyes only, those who were patient enough to make it till the end. Thanks.
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Leo is a self-taught photographer who has been working with Buddhijeev in multiple roles for two years now. You can follow them on Instagram, where they post some of their photographs. They are always interested in talking about cinema, identity, and food.
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