A seven-year-old girl hovers behind the loom where her carpet weaver father and his assistant work, hand-knotting a wool carpet in a tradition going back half a millennium. The carpet weaver has forbidden her to learn his trade, as many of her peers are doing at their father’s workplaces. He would rather she becomes a teacher or a nurse than learn the craft that barely gives him a decent livelihood and little recognition. This way many ancient crafts of the subcontinent die out bit by bit each generation.
The Nishat garden laid out by the father-in-law of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan today serves as a gathering space for the people of Srinagar. Designed in the Persian tradition of a pleasure garden it differs in that in is axial and linear rather than square and divided into four parts of the ‘chaarbagh’ pattern.
Young boys in India’s western desert learn to ride and train camels early in their lives. Their only means of travel across shifting dunes and soft hot sand are these dromedaries, often rigged out in colourful regalia and harnesses, available to visitors for joyrides and for long hauls across the desert as carrier of trade goods.
Waiting on the bus these men of India’s rainiest state Meghalaya squat effortlessly, puffing on tobacco in pipes, unlike most parts of India where it is coarsely-rolled and smoked like unfiltered cigarettes. Behind them the shelter is covered with sheets of large tin cans opened up and recycled to become the siding or wall covering –protection against the rain which reach 11,700mmm annually, yes that is about 39 feet of rainfall each year.
Gathering around an evening campfire the travellers of India’s Thar for festivals is an excuse to meet friends, swap stories, share meals, even as the day’s business of trading goods and animals is done.
Monasteries across Ladakh, and its culturally and geographically analogous region of Tibet, are retreats where very young boys from Ladakhi homes are sent to become monks, and where they spend their whole lives devoted to spiritual pursuits. The buildings are remote structures perched on hilltops, and are both sanctuaries in times of strife and cultural and religious centres for the people.
