Ilkal
Like a matchbox, the village folds in on itself, shut out completely in a fragile, papery darkness. The seclusion is intimate, feeling like a pile of useless matchsticks that clump on each other, waiting for their day. Any hope for this place is that rare, nobody is thinking of miracles. Somewhere, lights dangle, smelling of kerosene and desperation. It swathes you in unsettling light, so that even the uneasy sympathy that you have carried along with you like loose change clatters to the non-pavement. They don’t have pavements here. This is the sign of the cooling earth, now sprawled like a scarlet fever that marauders every unlikely traveler. You must know that this stretch of road is unfrequented. Rugged paths leeched away into their own red dust, a landscape that is realized in the broken bodies of those who toil under an unforgiving sun. The waterways have choked, running now like the grimy sludge of our own conscience, clogged in the turrets of our own decay. An easy pollution that we have allowed. Someone tells me this was a river once. When hogs waddle in this slush, you can only watch with a sadness that is as keen as it is honorable. The place demands it.
This road is not on popular maps. This is the road for the calloused feet. This is the road where tire marks are that of the rickshaw. If you see the road clawed by wheels, it is of the uncertain bus that comes only once a day, or not at all. The lack of transport has made the villagers rugged and prone to quick walks. It has also sequestered them into a brilliant art that winds it’s spools in the sweltering quiet of their homes. This harsh heat has bred artisans. There is mystery and such an immense beauty in their weaves—iconic, but unrecognized. Famous only by the word of mouth. A dying art of the dying earth, preserved only in a villager’s ancient hands that has worked beyond capacity. The anger of the sun is pronounced in the startling craftsmanship of the Ilkal weave. It will astonish you.
Electric wires that warp the space and tungsten flames that gather moths. Bruised dreams that hang by them, along the clotheslines that cheap plastic cloth holders support. An occasional kid who still hasn’t learnt the brutality and the disparity of worldly ways. Old men in shawls they crafted, wearing their callouses and wrinkles proudly. Men of everyday ways whose weariness has wizened them. Men with two-wheelers who think they are rich and privileged to have afforded what you could throw away in your metropolis. Trucks and lorry drivers who have enough kindness for a smile, for a portrait, for some way to make their lives better. You will encounter them all here.
But you will also learn the strange misfortune of falling in love with a place that needs repair. The beauty of disintegrations. Doorways that lead to walls splattered with dirt, hinges that have never been maintained. Dim hallways that aren’t rich enough for a new coat of paint. Tired plaster. In the haphazard and the unruly, in a village that nobody thought to document, you are baffled by the importance of everyday instances. And this is why the weavers and the ragged, the old and the broken never left. Despite the hardship, there is room enough for a shared cup of coffee, a conversation, a child to lift a pile of rocks as their parents weave, with the wish to see gold
Written by Lakshmi Bharadwaj
Photographs by Arvind Sridhar
For more photo stories check out their blog- Occhiolic Drift
