God made man/ Man made god

The visceral beauty of clay lies not only in its almost poetic organicness but rather in its possibility, the possibility of it becoming anything, any shape or form, any thought or idea and it is this possibility that is molded in the hands of a sculptor, given a shape, a new meaning a new purpose. Clay has no prejudice against you, it has no ego and no memory, it lies there in its unfettered infinite silence being essentially nothing at all and that is why it can be anything, even God.

In India, the sculptures of deities for religious festivals are made of clay, and that often presents itself as a paradox to my understanding because considering the current discourse in the country (if it can be even called a discourse), especially the socio-political and religious discourse, which is turning rapidly unidimensional and rigid, all black and white, there is an evident disconnect between the core material and these idols, the inside, and the outside, these sculptures of faith have turned to sculptures of paradoxes, they have been reduced to mere symbols.

And often looking at these idols especially during the time of immersion, where they end up piling up over each other because of the huge influx, they crash, collide and collapse under the pressure, their features partially melt, waste plastic drapes all over them and their colors smudge together, they look rather alive out of their helplessness, more so because of the meanings associated with them as well as the obvious anthropomorphic form of the idol. Something that was revered for days suddenly lies like a heap of discarded junk, strangely surreal and evidently hypocritical.

 

Being an atheist myself, I can arguably say that I enjoy an objective standpoint of religious processions, I never actively participate nor do I despise them, but when I look at the whole ritual of idol immersion, the question I often find myself asking is not one of religion but one of individual faith, of convenience, of hypocrisy, of denial and of creation – Did God create man or man create god.

And the line between the two seems to blur out when you see the process of idol making, where god is created from scratch. Once you visit a makeshift shack of an idol sculptor, it is not that difficult to feel rather bewildered once you see these idols with whom so many emotions and meanings are associated, lying their deconstructed, stacked together like products in a factory. The sculptors I met who have put up their shack at the corner of a busy crossing in NOIDA, say they produce more than 15,000 idols per year, ranging from small, 1’ to 3’, to big ones, which are 5’ to 12’ high. This small enterprise is run by three Bengali sculptors, Bipul, Paritosh and Sunjoy, all belonging to a lineage of idol sculptors, which is quite evident once you see them work together in perfect unison and the swift precision of their hands. They say they feel a deep sense of pride when they see people pray to the idols created by them, however, once you ask them which god they themselves pray to, they say they don’t pray to any god, they pray to mud (matti in Bengali), they revere it as much as a deity, for it provides livelihood.

This shack is not just a place for work it is also the place where they live, once you walk across their shack, you will find some of the discarded or even under construction sculptures being used as hanger for clothes, for placing earphones, the sculptures have infused with their daily paradigm much like a plant growing out of the crevices of concrete. You will also find headless idols, molds of various idols’ heads and also a few dogs taking shelter among the idols.

 

 

 

Sunjoy, the youngest of the three, tells me that he loves to sketch but once he was introduced to sculpting by his father, he found it to be more natural to him and fulfilling. Pointing at the various processes happening, he starts explaining the process of idol making in detail:

The basic armature is made using finely cut pieces of bamboo which are tied together using a rope, then dry grass is used to cover the armature to create the body form of the idol, once the dry grass is tied together and is held firmly using jute rope, a layer of wet clay is smeared uniformly all over the dry grass, once all the moisture has dissipated from the first layer, then another layer is added. Features such as hands, feet and the head that require specific details are made separately and conjoined later.

As I sit in a corner, with Sunjoy beside me, neatly preparing bundles of dry grass for the armature, a few feet away, I see Vipul’s hand caressing the clay over a sculpture, Paritosh, sculpting the eyes and ears of a freshly prepared head cast with impeccable precission, I can’t help but wonder about their dedication and their effortless skill, but a part of my thought again drifts into the idea of man, god, and creation. And as I take in all the movement around me, for no tangible reason, I find god as fallible as us, everything as perfect or imperfect as anything else, I find faith slowly becoming amorphous.

 

Photos and text by Aadit Basu

 

Textures of time / Traces of memory

In a very basic sense, photographs capture moments. However, what matters to the viewer on a very superficial level is what the photograph is really trying to show in that instant. Seldom do we realize and ask ourselves about the million little things hidden inside a photograph, how many moments have bought this one photograph to life, how many intersections of fate and choices?

That smile on the face, those cracks on the wall, and those vibrant colours on the streets and the textures on the tree everything has a story and more importantly a history with an ominous touch of providence.

Photography is one of the most easiest ways we can really capture “now”- the moment, the moment which can never ever be created again. Every second is new and every second is old. So we capture the now and in our own way we make the moment immortal, again immortal being a relative term. Relative to our own individual lifespan.

Now if we really analyze time, we will comprehend that there is no real permanence around us, in physical sense as well as in the metaphysical sense. Time, as I view it, is like a constantly drifting heap of sand, however, I don’t know about the direction in which it is drifting in and I guess no one else does either, but yes, it is drifting and it is arbitrary.

Often thinking in these lines, I have felt insecure and have felt that we are constantly between a sort of hurricane or a turbulence and for one or the other reason we fail to acknowledge that and that is what creates the illusion all around us. We live life under the illusion of permanence. We try to hold on to time, try to capture it, yet the reality is that there is no permanence, there is nothing inscribed on a stone.

So this insecurity of ours that constantly tells us that we are not permanent is a collective conscience of the world and often the one that is usually dejected. We all try to capture time in our own sense but sooner or later we realize that even memories have an expiry date.

And we often ask “Are we really so fragile?” The truth is – YES and how we handle this in reality, on a larger scale, I guess, will come to define us.

It is a very simple thought that and we often say this that “Everything is just a process of time”or “Time cures everything”, well yes it is the most fundamental thought, however I guess the realization of this comes very slowly, we all know and have felt this, but it is not like an epiphany, it is a gradual process of understanding. It needs cultivation. It needs acceptance and in return what we get is a larger horizon of understanding and beautifully instilled patience in us.

So with that thought that everything is just a process of time. I ended up thinking about textures. Honest, unhampered ironies of time – textures. They’re a process of time, they cultivate in the most natural way and the thing that interests me the most is that they contain memory. Time no matter how intangible it seems it sure does leave traces around us. Everything that we have done since our birth till the present moment is engraved inside those textures, every choice we have made is contained inside them.

This passage of time is what gives us layers and layers of textures, each layer has its own story, each layer has been touched in a different way by time, each its own permutation of situations and somewhere between this intangible time and the tangible texture we find the “memories”. These memories have affected the shape, size and colour that we see in the present.

So just like photography, textures in themselves capture time. In fact, the beauty lies in the fact that textures don’t remain the same, just like time, they are ever-changing. I think the closest we will ever get to touching and seeing time is through textures. Photographs are basically just a visual representation of the past but just like I asked before how often do we really know the story behind every single element inside the picture? Why are those things there? What was the photographer thinking?

Here exactly in these fronts, textures transcend photography. They are innocent, they are natural and they honestly show how time has affected them. We don’t have to dig any further than what is on the surface alreday and the whole story is right there. Now it could be a living or a non living entity; both get affected by time equally and they leave a mark on each other for a lifetime.

This scene from Alfrid Hitchkok’s Vertigo shows the section of a tree and the rings inside it  have been marked according to their corresponding year of significance. Somehow this concept intrigued me a lot and made me even more interested in exploring textures.

 

Because textures are naturally shaped and given exsistence by time. We cannot deny how intimately they’re bound to us, how intimately they define us. They can easily be termed as the metaphor for all things that we have been through, everything is stored inside them. They’re the perfect representation of the world inside us.

In simple terms, as memories are in layers, so are textures.

To be honest, I have felt a certain sense of permanence within them. Maybe the words are not right, maybe “forever”,”ultimate”etc are all just illusions that we are chasing. Often while exploring the possibilities of textures and their impact I have asked myself that how much of forever will be forever for us and the answer has never come to me because there is none.

PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE BLIND

I have often noticed that one of the best things, at least in the fields of art can never really be described or quantified; I think once this scale of premium artistry is achieved then the work transcends the verbose.Nobody can define it, it is formless yet it fits into every mould you put it into.

Now when I put this thought in line with the way a blind man thinks I figured that often we miss out on the feelings because of our in-built hardware that pushes us to quantify things visually rather than just pure heartedly.This sensation of touch is how he interprets the world, those are his words and in those are his emotions. We have to reach a different level of wavelength to actually articulate his sensibilities.

However in terms of photography, a photograph is of no use to a blind person, sounds, touch and above all his natural intuition is what maters to him the most. His inner gut is way much more stronger than people who can see. Now how do you explain the storage of memory to him for his world is completely different. He stores his memories way more different from us, his memories are made of touch.

The reason why I’m suddenly talking about the visually impaired is because come to think of it textures in a way are a blind man’s photograph.

Every time you touch a texture you touch a part of memories.

The search starts here

 

This is Muhammad Kasif, a loban, he perpares coal for a variety of jobs and claims to be prepairing some of the finest coals in old delhi. He’s been in this job for more than 30 years and his hands bore the insignia of his history. He tells me that in years he has not seen his hands in their original colour.

 

Found these vibrant textures in one of the alleys of Chawri Bazar. A million stories reside inside these textures.

Amber Fort in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Built in 1592, photographed in 2016. Nearly 420 years of memories.

 

Ravi, a cobler from chandni chowk. His father bought the equipments in the 80’s and set up his shop just outside Jama Masjid, prudently thinking about the large crowd that arrives there everyday. Somehow i feel this anvil has stored in a lot of memories in itself, not just the coblers but the customers as well.

 

AADIT BASU