Our India trip had been largely programmed through the communication with Priyam, young intern at the artist collective of Chander Haat, which were our hosts for about a month’s time. The fantastic community that Chander Haat turned out to be is composed of many artists and many assistants, all helping out as they can, with art, driving, cooking, and building. It is a community that thrives on the intersection of art practice and village life, at the borders between the urban madness of Kolkata and the lowlands of Sarsuna village. Chander Haat is also a centre of artist studios and a couple of guest rooms with a common kitchen, a great yard with a garden, a roof from which you can listen to the birds and the religious calls and vendors chants, and from which you can make kites fly very high.

Most of the collective’s work deals with themes related to the Durga Puja, which we learned is a major Hindu celebration taking place annually in October, with a huge festival in Kolkata. The idol of the goddess Durga is celebrated with inventive community-built pandals, statues built by the sculptors in the neighborhood of Kumartuli, and a lot of drumming too.

The area around Chander Haat is composed mostly of ponds which become the centre attraction for the locals at night, narrow streets with canals of indescribable water running through, and mango trees that are sometimes visited by monkeys. But it’s along larger highways that autos and colorful buses speed to take you toward the city centre and back. Running around on the bus was definitely one of our major activities, a stage for dramas between locals. Social norms are crazy on buses, not only because women and men sit on separate sides, but also because taking a seat or not taking a sit, and how squeezed you are in your seat become a sort of political and social statement. The metro lines are being expanded as well, but at the moment the one leaving from Sarsuna is too short to be of any use. As much as the streets of the village were populated by animals (owls, mysterious furred creatures, monkeys, and cattle), it is heartbreaking that actually the big highways are home mostly to humans, whom we often saw sleeping on the floor or camping right on the dividers between two crowded lanes.

Another incredibly impressive aspect for which we were not prepared is the management of waste. Oh if only we could choose not to produce waste - in the best case it ends up in a pile in the back garden, and in the worst it pollutes rivers or is eaten by the wandering cows. On the matter, we happened to watch a very interesting film as well, that you can find online here.

Sourcing food was a little bit of a daily struggle for us, because restaurants are not really a thing in the villages (mostly people would go out for a snack and tea), and deliveries are possible only with a local phone number. So we often got to cooking for ourselves and sometimes we would cover all the distance to a major road on foot. But we were daily and faithful customers of a very special shop, run by a single man around the corner who would knead every morning a certain flaky bread, he would beat and cut it into shreds, and then serve it in portions alongside a delicious soup. The breakfast was clearly very popular also among local children who would be patiently looking at him prepping.

Both at the village and in the city we were constantly stared at, very often even asked to be taken pictures with, especially in more touristy places. We mostly agreeably accepted until we decided we could start refusing, and then still people would take photos of us anyway…

Another very remarkable and mundane aspect of our everyday life was the weather, because for our first trip to India we chose nothing other than the monsoon season! Therefore now and then we got caught during our strolls by wild storms and insane winds. And the rest of the time, it was very very hot.

We learned a lot through the past work of the local artists and by daily conversations with them too, everything from the arsenic problem in the water pumps, to the recent past of West Bengal. We have grown a deep curiosity for the rich traditions of the country, including food, textiles, and music. There was a lot of talking about Baul musicians, who are commonly regarded as the traditional musicians who live off their music, and have a strong sense of non-religious spirituality, deeply rooted in their body. Apparently, this tradition has a strong cultural centre in the city of Shantiniketan, which is the city grown out of the school built by the generally beloved Reimbrandth Tagore in the so-called Bengali Reaissance. We later learned also that all the students at this school are required to pick up a musical instrument in the first year of their degree, and then they are free to continue it or not afterwards.

*Drummers are always being automated away*

Talking about music, we got to meet harmonium makers and tabla makers in their shops; but maybe the most amusing instruments of them all is this sort of automaton drum that seems to be used for temple prayers, and starts off loud and clear all on its own.

Hospitality in West Bengal is generous, and there are many home-cooked meals we truly cannot forget, from thali to biryani, from mango chutney to many sweets. We also ate a lot of jackfruit freshly picked from the garden. But it’s tea that takes up most of the day really, and Bengali workers are reknowned for taking long siestas in the middle of the day to stay with family.

One truly unexpected aspect for us was the discovery of the heritage of communism in this area of the country. You can see it on murals on almost every street, and it goes as far as having Communist centers in the little villages and depicting the goddess Kali with a hammer and sickle.

But of course, West Bengal has various political challenges to grapple with, going from remaining issues of colonialism to religious differences that contemporary politicians try to exacerbate. It was in the days around our time in Kolkata that a ruling banned the screening of the film The Kerala Story directed by Sudipto Sen, saying its release could trigger communal unrest in some parts of the state; then the director was summoned to be interrogated.

The first trip we took outside the village to downtown had the Indian Museum as our main destination. This is the largest Museum (as we conceive museums in the West, at least) of all of Asia. But it is possibly also one of the least curated and well maintained ones? Dusty imperial rooms from a colonial past are filled to the brim with endless collections of roughly labelled and stored pieces.

The second trip to the city had a different purpose: we got to visit some art galleries together with a local artist, who we had previously met on the occasion of a virtual residency. Twinkle has been a fantastic host and opened our eyes to many aspects of living in Kolkata. (speaking in terms of art-related institutions we discovered the gallery Experimenter and Emami Art, the Seagull Foundation, and Galerie 88). And it was on her suggestion that we did a third and final trip, this time to the Kali temple in the north of the city. The visit was unique in its own way and on top of that we got to travel on a boat along the Hooghly River to get back to town.

After our obligatory visit to electronic component stores, and a foodie visit to Zachariah street, we strolled down College street where we highly recommend paying visit to the staple Indian Coffee House.

One of the craziest parts of town is Howrah station, a sort of microcosmos of the city in itself. At the end of our stay, from Howrah we caught a night train toward New Delhi. We were served three entire meals and, even though the service call repeatedly warns you not to give tips and even the uniform worn by the service men has embroidered on it the same message, you are in fact expected to give a tip for the service.

We went to Delhi for no particular reason other than the fact that we wanted to visit the capital before heading to Nepal. We spent most of our time visiting touristy spots, refusing auto and taxi services, and … eating. The highlight for us was probably represented by the visit to Humayun's Tomb complex, with incredibly beautiful architectures built around 1547–1548.

If there was one thing we could mention to complain about our stay in India, it is the volume of the car honks - by the end, painfully unbearable! But overall we cannot wait to make future plans to be back in the country and discover many more of the very different places making up a multicultural and complex society.

Nepal

Our destination in the Nepalese capital was Kaalo 101, an incredible house both architectonically speaking and in terms of the community that has been created around it, and that attracts creatives not only from Nepal but also from Pakistan, India, and other countries that cannot count on such a ‘safe space’. We will never forget our first meal around the corner from the residency, crowned with a fantastic strong rice beer, and based around beaten rice.

There are quite a few interesting institutions in the city of Kathmandu, that we got to visit: the Kathmandu Jazz Conservatory is run by a young Spanish-Nepalese couple that is a joy to chat with, and has a very good support program for students to study and sometimes prepare for further training abroad; there is Fluxbox, run by Anil Subba (artist name: a.m.u.r.t.a.r.i.t.i) and helped by Chakshita, new friends of ours thanks to the introduction of Nischal Khadka; Chakshita also works at the Nepal Digital Archive, an interesting initiative tasked with a lot of collection and archival work with minimum funding; and finally we visited an art gallery and residency, Mcube.

The city is truly magical, with the towering but unstable temples, the singing Newari voices in the early morning, the fountains where people gather due to the water shortage, the beautiful dkaha textiles used for the hats, and the many momo restaurants.

Our stay ended with a live performance at Siddharta Gallery alongside a.m.u.r.t.a.r.i.t.i and Nilotpal Das, and a workshop around VCV and synthesis open for everyone at Kaalo.