The earliest humans moved in search of food and shelter throughout the span of their lives. This movement was continuous and progressive in nature; life was one long journey across time and space, motivated by our primal needs. Over time, as many communities adopted sedentary lifestyles, there was a shift in the nature of the journeys we undertook. With a permanent home to return to every night, these journeys became cyclical; with food being cultivated as opposed to gathered, the motivations behind our journeys expanded to include recreation, and later leisure, and travel. Cyclical journeys however have not completely replaced the progressive and continuous ones; the ultimate journey of life remains the movement of our minds and bodies, from birth to death. By virtue of being human, we are charged with manoeuvring through a multitude of journeys on a daily basis, some that are small and repetitive, while others that are long and continuous. And so, for Hakara’s 15th edition, we invited submissions that ruminate on the theme of ‘Journey’, and expand our understanding of the world through these ruminations.
The contributions we received for this edition grapple with this precondition of human life, and push us to draw connections between the many directions that our internal and external lives move in. They examine the motivations behind undertaking different journeys, the courses that various journeys in history have taken, and the impacts of some of these journeys on our lives. Responding in a variety of media and forms, our contributors pushed us to think of the theme from different angles and varying distances. They reminded us of how integral the act of moving from one point to another is to human life.
In his essay titled “Journeys that ‘Move’: Revisiting Satyajit Ray’s Nayak” Dr. Pathik Roy dissects the eponymous film to examine the relationship between the protagonist’s train journey from Kolkata to Delhi and his internal journey into the hidden recesses of his mind. Arguing that the former acts as a stimulus for the latter, Roy says that the journey brings out the latent fears, desires, and insecurities hidden deep within the film’s protagonist. He continues, “Nayak brings out the maxim that sometimes a journey yields more than the destination for a journey has the potential to “move” us out of our mundane comfort zones and lead to confrontations that can be both intense and epiphanic.” Ray’s mastery of his craft is clear in the seamlessness with which he nests the multiple layers of journeys in his film, making sure that none is superfluous to its message.
In Nayak the physical location that the protagonist arrives at the end of the movie is almost peripheral to the plot of the film. In Ajay Sharma’s case, however, the charm of physical destination is what motivates his journeys. In “Realms of Journey – Within and Beyond”, Sharma writes that as a child he fulfilled his fantasies to travel to different locations through the stories and souvenirs his neighbours brought back from their travels; back then, journeys were a “more of a mental experience than physical”. Even as he grew older, his desire to travel did not fade; he grabbed every possible opportunity to visit new places. Sharma recalls his train journey from Vadodara to Guwahati, on his way to an art camp in Manipur: in the absence of a confirmed seat, he says that he travelled 3 days standing in his compartment, only to be able to witness the scenic beauty of the place he had heard so much about!
While Sharma’s essay points to how souvenirs and stories can transport people to physical locations, Jai Apte’s essay reveals how an animal became a window to a distant culture. Titled “Journey of the African Beauty to France”, the essay chronicles the travels of Zarafa, the Nubian giraffe who was a gift from Muhamad Ali (the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt) to King Charles X of France in 1827. This present was an attempt at maintaining diplomatic relations between the two countries. Soon after arriving in Paris, Zarafa became a popular icon amongst the public, appearing on various consumer products and becoming inextricably tied to the growing consumer culture of the time. One of the few giraffes present in Europe at the time, Zarafa symbolised the exotic other in the minds of the French public. She was a symbol of the “exotic” lands that European powers were both fascinated by, and desired to control during the 19th century. To have this mysterious creature in their midst now also facilitated the colonial practice of its examination and classification; sizing up formerly mysterious aspects of the natural world helped better control them. Her journey is a reminder of the social structures that many of our movements are entrenched in.
Finally, journeys allow us to move outside of our circles of familiarity, exposing us to new ideas, practices, and living and non-living objects. Just as the French public encountered a foreign animal for the first time, with Zarafa’s arrival in the country, Nilima Sheikh came across the artwork in the Dunhuang Caves because of her travels to China. In an interview titled “Accumulated Grace: Nilima Sheikh on the Dunhuang Caves” she talks to Sneha Ragavan and Özge Ersoy of Asia Art Archive, about how the work she encountered there has had a significant influence on her artistic practice. A site that facilitated the flow of knowledge, trade goods across different religious and ethnic cultures between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, the Dunhuang caves feature thousands of Buddhist sculptures and paintings. Elaborating on her experience, Sheikh says,
What really amazed me was the incorporation of the heavens: into the air, into the world, into perception—and the animation of that. In the caves, everything has a sense of having alighted, or flown in, rather than having grown out of the soil as we often think—in the materialisation of figures in Ajanta or generally in most, particularly western and southern, Indian historical art. At Dunhuang, there is a sense of not only the inhabitation of the air, of the heavens, but also the mobilisation of them.
Sheikh goes on to connect this quality of the paintings at Dunhuang with her experience of walking in the mountains growing up. It pushed her belief that people experience space very differently in the mountains; “The land levitates and lowers under your feet, opening changing vistas below”. This way of imagining pictorial spaces reflects strongly in her work, Noopur Desai translates this interview into Marathi for Hakara’s current edition.
As Sheikh’s journey to a different country pushes her to introspect deeply about the lived experiences that reside within her; Ray’s protagonist in Nayak looks back on his life while the train lurches forward from Kolkata to Delhi. Similarly, the many journeys in our lives are simultaneous, intertwined and often move in oppositional directions. This edition is an attempt to understand how these journeys affect us as people, communities, and societies. It points to the fundamental fact that movement produces change, and this change is the hinge for the stories we tell as a society.
