Interfaces_Pravah Khandekar_2022 by Pravah Khandekar

INTERFACES selected transgressions by Pravah Khandekar

Application for M.Des Prog ram, Har vard G SD

“Go to the school my boy, as no one in our family has ever gone there”, the father commands the son. After several years of study, the son returns. The father enquires if he has learnt at the school ‘that by which, we percieve what cannot be perceived, and we know what cannot be known’.

CITY | BODY

N AT U R E | C U LT U R E

The son admits that he has’nt, and asks what that is. The journey of exploring the interface then begins, culminating into,

‘Tat Tvam Asi’

- Chandogya Upanishad

SOUND | COGNITION

MATTER | TIME

Me, you and the interface are indeed one. MATERIALITY | COMMUNITY

PHOTOGRAPHY | PERFORMANCES AND FILMS | CHAI

BODY | CITY

SEMICOLON An experimental controversy by Pravah Khandekar

Personal - Independent research and film project August 2019 - April 2021 Mentor - Prof. Satyaki Roy, IIT Kanpur

Semicolon; to lessen the gap between this and after. The film dwells in a capricious interface between the self and the other. Suspended in an in-betweenness, a motley of interludes, a mirage of lived, imagined and perceived reality, the film revels in the delirious derailment of the mind when confronted with illness and mortality, in the performance of the city of Varanasi. Traversing mnemonic scapes the character finds himself in an unapologetic spatial and temporal dance. Living his own death, he becomes both - a participant and an observer in the performance. Moksha is an exit. In its pursuit, does the performance matter?

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DIRECTOR’S NOTE

The elusive city of Varanasi has long intrigued us; it unsettled us, more than it has eased. This is our debut production, perhaps merely an ephemeral articulation on one of our several lingering inquiries on the oldest living city - “Why do people come to the city of Varanasi to die?”, we asked. We went to Varanasi as mere observers, in search of an answer to our enduring question, with an unbiased eye, refraining from any pre-conceived notions that would stem our perception and imagination. However, within no time, we realized that we have already been assimilated as part of a relentless and a larger cultural performance; we surrendered and let the city act on us. The spectacular multiplicities, dichotomies and vibrant contradictions which we witnessed, lead us to no singular answer. Instead, it compelled us to seek the city, and its manifesting performance, for what it is. We, the humble observers, had become active co-performers on this urban stage. As artists, amidst this incessant play, where and how do we voice ourselves? Moreover, in the grasp of the ongoing pandemic, is the contemporary society ready for such a cultural expression? Semicolon is a celebration of this trepidation. Emerging out of an intrepid and experimental urge, Semicolon– positioned at the intersection of architecture, urban studies and psychology - attempts to nudge existing dispositions on

Varanasi. We aimed at an agnostic approach to our production, thus exploring the fundamental human condition and pursuit of self-preservation and immortality, which simultaneously also reasons that one can break free from the cycle of life and death and attain Moksha. Blurring our own disciplinary boundaries, and yet leveraging the stark dissimilarities and diversities in our respective opinions, perceptions, biases and visions, continually illuminating spaces of collective epiphanies was at the core of our process. Since its inception, it was clear to us that it is not a documentary, neither is it a work of fiction. In embracing the surreal, the film does not abandon reality, yet eschews conclusive realism. In the pursuit of capturing the city’s performativity and its spatial and temporal transience, the film runs the risk of its nonlinear narrational progression. The city of Varanasi ended up unfolding a script in front of us, we only improvised. As an abstract of the unfabricated account of the performance, Semicolon, tinged with a raw, unprocessed and uninhibited Indian cultural sensitivity and nuance, attempts to activate a site of flux, contestation, conflict, tension, relief and transformation. - Pravah Khandekar

Direction Script Screenplay Editing Music and Background Score Production Design Cinematography Cast

Choreographing the Body, rehearsals and shooting at IIT Kanpur Campus

SELF | OTHER

The film materially consists of a cubical box, that manifests as an interface between the inside and the outside. The box metaphorizes the interiority of the protagonist; his inner self. In the screenplay, the protagonist at times, transgresses the bounds of his inner self, and steps outside into the other. He traverses through the city and its performative stage, its gallies and ghats. Bewildered by the performance outside, he seeks his inner self, and returns to the box. The shooting, thus, was partially executed in a closed enviroment, and at outside locations in the city of Varanasi.

TEMPORAL DELIRIUM

Editing to me is re-writing the script. In the film, we articulate time as not linear, but spherical, where the past, the present and the future do not adhere to a linear and a mono-directional progression. This led to a radical disruption of the script, and the screenplay was eventually crafted as an temporal tapestry of the protagonist’s imagined and lived reality.

Black Screen

Cut to…

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 4

Scene 7

Scene 8 (Climax)

Ext. River. Fog. Grey.

Ext. Random Varanasi Lane. Around 2 am.

Int. the box - around 4 am Black screen.

The RED ball is floating on the river.

As it exhales the smoke, the box glows.

The boat is moving forward and the ball is seen receding. The Body seeing the ball move further out of its grasp becomes extremely anxious and jittery.

The characteristics of the Body and the box is revealed.

The Body wants to reach the ball, but it is very cold.

It takes another drag.

The Body slams the door shut, shivering.

The Body fumbles in its pocket and pulls out a RED ball. It observes the ball, romanticizes its existence.

Cut to... Scene 3 Int. Box. The Body is jittery and agitated.

The Body strikes a match and lights a bidi. It takes a drag.

The Body starts to bounce the ball. The ball rolls over outside from the slightly ajar door. The Body hastes towards the door and opens it wide.

The Body steps out in a Gali in Varanasi. Dim lit and quaint.

Box. (Cafe). Sometime in the morning around 10 am.

The sound of the ‘aarti’ seems to give The Body some relief.

Barking of dogs can be heard. Surprised to have not found the river, the Body is bewildered by the new context it has just entered. The Body walks around in the cold. It is in awe. The body is startled by the peculiarly empty and quiet gali, it begins to venture in this maze.

However, as the volume gradually begins to increase, the Body starts getting uncomfortable, eventually the sound turns unbearable. In that discomfort, the Body shuts its eyes.

A few hours pass. It is around 4 am.

The Body opens its eyes and finds a serving of apple strudel in a quarter plate placed in front of it.

The body is lost in the galis. It appears to be now responding to unknown sounds.

The quarter plate is placed on a wooden table in the box. A lamp is hanging above the table.

It is bewildered.

There is the sound of a noticeable chatter in the Box.

Int. BOX. The Body is exhausted and tired, it is lying on the floor. Eyes closed. A drop of viscous fluid splatters on its forehead. It opens its eyes. A Jalebi is kept partly cantilevered off the sill and is dripping with the sugar syrup. A drop of viscous fluid splatters on its forehead. Suddenly, water gushes into the box and touches the Body’s feet. Startled, it sits up straight.

It lights its half-smoked Bidi again. The Body is anxious because the ball is no longer with it, and it decides to jump into the river to get the ball back.

Int.

The seemingly source-less sounds make the Body frantic. It is scared and fleeing the sounds, the body now begins escaping the sounds.

The Body pokes its finger into the apple strudel and tastes it.

A second wave gushes in along with some orange flowers and an earthen pot. The Body is frightened out of its wits! It leaps out of the window.

The sound of the chatter continues.

It opens the door. The Body in desperation fumbles on door knobs and manages to open one and enters it.

The Body sees the water entering.It becomes nervous.

The Body takes a substantial bite of the strudel.

As it leaps, a third wave gushes in with the RED ball.

Behind the scenes in the Auditorium at IIT Kanpur Campus

Behind the scenes in the Auditorium a t I I T Ka n p u r Ca m p u s a n d i n Va ra n a s i

SONIC TERRITORIES

An original score was composed by me in Raga Champakali, an obscure raga in the Indian Classical tradition, and was played on the ROLI seaboard. The instrument allowed an extraordinary synthesizing possibilities with its 5D sensitive keyboard. Indian instruments were seamlessly superimposed electronically with strings, producing a genre-defying texture. Moreover, the score was further soundscapes enriched with field recordings that were done in the city of Varanasi in various locations, and at different times of the day, capturing a nuanced sonic grain of the urban performance of the city.

in the city, leading to its manifestation as a spatio-temporal performance. With the notion of publicness as a parameter, and bodies that constitute it, this paper dwells deeper into the conception of the spiritual reward of Moksha, and speculates on the possible processes in which it is delivered in the city of Varanasi. In addition, this paper appropriates the methodology of making the film, and introspects into the role of the authors as artists who sought experimental modes of experiencing and articulating the performance of city of Varanasi. In the process, the authors explore a narrative based elucidation of the interfacial phenomena that occurred at the boundary between them as artists, and the city of Varanasi as their set. Kettle on the Pier

This manuscript was selected and presented at the International conference at the Goldsmiths, University of London.

Va r a n a s i – A n i n q u i r y i n t o S pa c e , Performance and Bodies Pravah Khandekar and Atimantyu Vashishth Sir JJ College of Architecture (Y5)

Abstract

Life has a gnawing inclination for self-preservation, and yet we have a cause to believe that one can escape life, its cycles, its shackles, and transcend death itself by not being reborn. The city of Varanasi has had people travelling at the end of their lives, in the pursuit of this salvation, a spiritual reward, Moksha. How can a physical space reward an exit from life and death? Through ‘social action’, which is produced as a result of the interaction of animate and inanimate bodies, the city is perceived, believed and experienced to afford Moksha (Mumford, 1937). The inhabitants with their respective props convincingly adopt their roles in the delivery of this spiritual reward, forming a granular theatre. Thus, as a historical cultural landscape, the city of Varanasi manifests as evolving ‘situated events’, collectively forming a cultural performance (Sinha, 2017). This presentation, coupled with the short film Semicolon investigates the performativity of the city, and enquires the inherent democratic nature of this performance in hosting the various identities of its performers, and the multitude of modalities it can inherit. Varanasi can even invite one to bear witness to a tourist cruise in front of a cremation Ghat, compelling one to question their own ethical constructs and biases, social aesthetics and philosophical hygiene. Keywords Performance; Death; Identity; Democracy; Moksha Introduction

The city of Varanasi is one of the oldest living cities in the world. It has historically hosted people in the pursuit of Moksha- a spiritually rewarding escape from the relentless cycles of life and death. The authors seek a critical departure from prevalent archetypical perspectives on Varanasi and its social construct, that have reduced the image of city to a mere panorama of picturesque Ghats. Varanasi, through its public spaces, exhibits unconventional organisational capacities that compels one to rethink the ways in which the public and publicness is conceived in our contemporary spatial practices. Further, the city also instigates the authors to examine the role of spatial syntaxes and scripts that encode a distinctive social action

This section describes a rendezvous with the Manikarnika Ghat, on a winter morning at 3:30 am, which is considered to be the Bramha-Muhurta, an auspicious interlude for the first piers of the day to be cremated. The Manikarnika Ghat is a historically revered site where the process of cremation is not concealed but staged with and within the public. The authors were there to shoot a climactic sequence of their short-film titled Semicolon. The following incident describes the Manikarnika Ghat as witnessed by the authors. Further, with these observations the authors wish to relook and articulate at the radically unsettling organisation of the Ghat and its bodies, both live and dead. On a foggy winter morning we ferried a boat from the Assi Ghat along the Ganges, towards the North to reach the Manikarnika Ghat. We were a crew of four, the authors of this paper along with our protagonist and the director of photography. As the hand drawn paddle rowed us forward, we discussed the possible ways through which we could achieve our choreographed scenes on the cremation Ghat. We particularly wanted the Ghat to be ablaze with burning piers; a setting which would satisfy our aesthetical requirements. As we approached the Ghat, securing the boat and deboarding it was a challenge. The shores of the Ghat are lined with many motor-powered boats floating with logs of dry wood, to be used in the piers which made docking difficult. Moreover, the water below was murky and constituted a marsh of mud, ash and an assortment of articles employed in the act of cremation – marigold flowers, husk of coconut, chunni, debris of half-burnt wood and human bones and incense sticks. Standing along the edge of the water and trying to plan the scene, we manoeuvred ourselves through a site where a group of people were arranging a fresh pier for a dead body to be cremated. We were immersed in a cloud of ash and smoke, and were surrounded by the rattling sounds of the human skulls cracking under the heat of a fire, smouldering wood emanating from the various piers that were already burning, staunch smell of burning bodies and a few roosters that were announcing the break of the dawn. The site was populated by a motley of people. Some persons were members of the family of the body on the pier. There were some individuals of the ‘Dom’ community, a sect of people who make a living by carrying out the process of cremation and burning the corpse. We could also hear the chants of ‘Ram Naam Satya Hei’ which was an auditory confirmation for an arriving funeral procession. In a corner we could spot a vagabond cuddled up with a stray dog, clawing onto the warmth of radiating from the pier besides. Through the smoke we also witnessed a silhouette of an ascetic; Aghori, who stood still and inert in the freezing water of the Ganges. Some people were simply costumers of the various Chaiwallahs, hovering around serving tea, and heating their kettles on fleeting flames of the piers. In the background of this anecdote let us look at figure 1. This photograph was captured by the authors from a high vantage point at the Ghat, after the break of dawn. The photograph allows one to visually map the possible trajectories that the authors would have taken from the shore of the river up the Ghat. Firstly, the authors would like to introspect on the moral predicament of considering such a somber site like the Manikarnika Ghat as a potential set for an artistic production. The piers that were objects being mourned by their families, were for the authors simply pieces of art. However, as they reached the Ghat, they were utterly stunned by the overtly dichotomous reality. The Ghat hosted not only piers but a multitude of users who rendered the Ghat to be more than merely a physical cremation ground, into a space that could afford with stoic indifference, the simultaneity of the brazen act of survival, livelihood, rituals, aspirations, beliefs, and the mundanity of routines. This multiplicity unshackled the authors from their apprehensions that emerged from generic ethical schemas and protocols which are nurtured within conventional sensibilities. Just as the authors adjusted themselves to this vivid and surreal scenography, a ferry rowed past the Ghat in the evening, with onlooking spectators, a few awestruck and a few indifferent by the burning piers. This visual can be seen in figure 2. The ferry is a private enterprise, and a paid service which provides tourists an opportunity to witness the array of the Ghats along the river. The city of Varanasi and its people have ingrained the sanctity of death to such an extent that publicly performing the act of cremation for and within a collective, has led to such spectacularly singular sights in the world where death is at once accepted, acknowledged and rejoiced. Thus, Manikarnika Ghat as a public space challenges the attitude of consuming a space and being consumed by it, allowing one to maintain their own independent philosophical hygiene.

Figure 1 and 2: A scene from Manikarnika Ghat at 08:00 AM, and 08:00 PM respectively. (photos captured by the authors)

Semicolon, is a 16-minute short film that follows a protagonist through the performance of the city of Varanasi. It accounts for the various circumstances, both material and immaterial, that the city offers the protagonist. Bewildered by the vivid algorithms of the public, the protagonist desperately seeks an escape, and enters his own sense of interiority and finds solace from the sensorial deluge of the performative other, that manifests outside in the public spaces of Varanasi. The film physically realises this interiority through a self-designed material object-a 2×2×2 m habitable cube, a white box. The box metaphorizes the algorithm of the self, which through its bounds, forms an interface with the other. The atmosphere of the box was deterministically crafted to depict the self and its functioning, and thus the scenes in the film that comprised of the box were shot in a closed environment, where nearly all spatial parameters could be ascertained. (Figure 5) In addition, the box comprised of a door and a window, that allowed the algorithms of the other to permeate into the algorithm of the self. The screenplay consists of a montage of various instances where the protagonist is seen visually accessing the box through a door while he traverses through the city. At other moments, he can be seen employing the small window in the box, that allows him to come into the contact with the other. Therefore, the other and the self were imagined as leaking into each other through these openings. Through this method, the screenplay intends to bring together the disparate algorithmic interaction of the self and the other. This interfacial phenomenon is further accentuated through the temporal non-linearity of the film which fluctuates between these two different operating algorithms. Furthermore, the film was largely guided by a self-written script that determined its progression. However, given the ephemerality of the performance of the city, the authors, during the making, had deliberately kept room for improvisation that offered them feats of spontaneous creation. Conclusions

Algorithms and Publicness

In this section, we refer to the photographs 3 and 4, that are captured by the authors at the Dashashwamedh Ghat, which is another popular destination along the sequence of Ghats, where the famous Ganga Aarti is held in the city of Varanasi. The river Ganges invites a sea of people to its shores to take a dip in its holy water. The two photographs capture this tradition where people can be observed having a bath in the river. Besides this group of people, there are several concurrent activities taking place, for example one gentleman within this particular group, regardless of the people having a bath, is still collecting the same water and carrying it back as a holy souvenir. Moreover, the inverted boat, which is in the foreground of the photograph can be seen as being appropriated as a prop and spatial facility by the people. It is being used as a rack to hang clothes, which is also providing privacy to people, simultaneously to both men and women. The boat, in fact, has been transformed from a medium of transportation into a unisex changing room along the edge of the water. These people, within the public, appear to be indifferent of their vast number of neighbours and seem to have comfortably sculpted their own spheres of privacy, both physical and psychological. At this juncture, the authors ask, that when does a body truly become public? What is it to be public? In the pursuit of spatial, organisational, programmatic surety and stability, public spaces, as observed in prevalent practices, have often tended to program a collective as a herd, which indoctrinates them for a purposive activity. A body in a such a public space, is therefore expected to confirm only to a set of pre-defined algorithms that determine its performance. However, in contrast, the circumstance of the Ghat seen in the photograph suggests that each individual body is left independent to craft their own, independent algorithms. There is no particular way that a ghat is used; it can be used in whichever way its users wish to. Consequently, the spatial syntax here is very specifically improvised by each body and thus, the collective transcends the characteristics of a herd. Hence, the Ghat, as a public space, emerges as a performative set that continually transforms and reinvents its identity. These sights offer us perspectives in the way the notion of publicness could be contested. Inherently, as observed, bodily algorithms operate in far more indeterministic ways than what the designed syntax of the space expects from them. A body and its inherent scripts are so improvisational that it re-discovers, and reshapes its performative role. Spaces like the Ghat, host an innate ‘effervescence’ and the organisational capacities of a collective that allow it to transcend its conventional functional imperatives (Benjamin, 1982). In this process, the space recodes itself and its syntax, and begins to encode novel, spontaneous, generative and simultaneous algorithms that resonate with and afford the other. (Miskowiec, 1986)

Figure 3: A scene from the Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi, India (photos captured by the authors)

Throughout history, the city of Varanasi has incessantly staged a diverse assemblage of vivid urban performances that are experienced through its public spaces. These performances thrive on the social and cultural idiosyncrasies that result from the interaction of multifarious bodies and their respective algorithms, that inhabit and operate in these public spaces. These idiosyncrasies and their unconventional organisations offer epistemological stimulants to the disciplinary discourses of architecture and design that prompt us to re-fashion our understanding of the conception of public and publicness.

Behind the Scenes (photos and renderings captured by the authors)

This paper illustrates circumstantial evidences, that are immanently based on ethical tensions and were a result of contradictory public algorithms juxtaposing over each other in a space such as the Manikarnika Ghat and the Dashashwamedh Ghat. In such public spaces, bodies are observed as writing their own independent programmatic and behavioural scripts. In turn, the spaces reciprocate by affording these stark multiplicities and simultaneity of these disparate algorithms. When the spaces begin to operate through these emergent and spontaneous algorithms, they embody a potential ‘other’ that reinvents their identity and allows them to transgress conventional organisational syntaxes. As the authors speculate, Moksha, the spiritual reward that assures the salvation from the cycles of life and death, materially and spatially appears to manifest as the other in the city of Varanasi (Miskowiec, 1986). Acknowledgements

This manuscript is an outcome of the author’s experiences during the making of their short film titled Semicolon – the gap between ‘this’ and ‘after’. The film received official selection at Short Encounters Film Festival, Greece: https://www.shortencountersiff.com/index.php/of-may-june-2021/, and Calcutta International Short Film Festival, Kolkata, India, 2021: https://www.cishortff.com/ . We sincerely acknowledge the spirit of the city of Varanasi for its perpetual performance.

Semicolon – the gap between ‘this’ and ‘after’

This research stimulated the authors to extend their enquiries, and lead to a mediatic exploration which could allow them to visually abstract, articulate and project the performance of the city and its characters through a cinematic expression. Their experiences fundamentally demanded the spatial and temporal flux of the city to be captured and then rendered in an evolving scenography. The authors wished to capture space in the state of active becoming rather than static being, which formed the foundations of their first independent production, Semicolon – the gap between ‘this’ and ‘after’. Figure 4: A scene from the Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi, India (photos captured by the authors)

N AT U R E | C U LT U R E

LIMINAL ECOLOGIES Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Revisiting the Ancient Salt Route

Academic - Final Year Thesis Research August 2021 - December 2021 Mentor - Prof. Mustansir Dalvi

The following are excerpts from the manuscript of my final year thesis (ongoing work).

Abstract

Borders are ubiquitous. It is a human tendency to delineate boundaries. These boundaries, however, are not rigid and stable, but exist as porous interfaces, that do not merely contain, but also permeate. Seeking to occupy such an interface, this research positions itself on the Trans-Himalayan landscapes of Nepal-Tibet border, an interface poised in a fragile in-betweenness, enmeshed in an assemblage of cultural, political, and geographical flux. The research aims at observing the ecologies that take shape on these borders, taking into account the complex cultural history of the borderlands, and the present emerging geopolitical imaginaries by the nation states that aim at reterritorializing the sociospatial landscape of the trans-Himalayan region. We observe these borders as sites in perpetual instability, yet in an equilibrium, by identifying the forces of reciprocity and tension across them and relooking at their inter-structural ambivalence as a potential stage for transformation.

Arguing on the reductive hegemony of stability, this research, though anchored to a geographically defined domain, extends into larger critical reflection into the act of border making and thus spatial production itself, by foregrounding the concern of architecture and its prevalent tendency to fetishize its social and material stability and identity as an object immune to change, to the point of inaction and stagnancy. In doing so, how can the agency of design operate within an unstable equilibrium, and remain both resilient and flexible to the ecological uncertainty? How can we reconcile the dichotomy of the innate hybridity of our identities and the human proclivity to delineate boundaries, and transcend the reductive dialectics of ‘we and ‘they’? The research acknowledges the primacy of change, eschewing from the whimsies of historical nostalgia or the anxiety of the uncertain future, in the pursuit of articulating and communicating the fluctuating, ever evolving present.

It is this thrill during my internship that inspired me to undertake this research as a part of my academic thesis. It was in fact during the stay at the site on the foothills of the Himalayas, that I was introduced to Mustang and its vibrant, obscure and oscillating history by a monk, who belong to the Tibetan community in exile. Some stories that he narrated of the remote land bordering the Tibetan highlands in northwest Nepal, and its communities, stimulated me to look at the region in the contemporary times, and observe the change that has come about in that region. What was even more fascinating was the ancient trade route, known as the salt route, which passed through this region and connected the arid Tibetan plateau to the northern plains of India. Who would know that present day Bihar, was in fact, historically closely linked with the Tibet? This premise of cross-cultural connects across geography, demands the discourse of the research to investigate the phenomenon of borders and the conditions of liminality. We look at borders as not merely as spatial delineation on a cartesian plane, but as systems that are inherently polysemic as having varied meanings for whoever encounters them (Balibar & Althusser, 2006). Moreover, the emerging meanings also vary through time. Therefore, borders, as they mean to this research, are not simply defined acts of differentiation, but are continuously evolving processes that determine the spatio-temporal dimensions of the border itself, and the landscape it is situated in. Mustang in particular is historically subjected to a border, which exists rather as an interface, that has shaped the complex cultural landscape of the region. With continuous political flux and geo-spatial spatial transformations, and increased globalising forces in the recent past, Mustang today finds itself in a critical liminality, which we wish to explore in this research. This chapter briefly reviews the historical development of Mustang in the presence of various natural and bureaucratic forces that have shaped the borderland and orients the research with a geographical and historical framework. The research and researcher, in its form, content and process live on a border, and hence the title of this chapter. Chapter 2 returns to an introspection on borders as systems and investigates the various forces that have in the past, and even today reconfigure the cultural landscape of Mustang. We posit, abstract and articulate Mustang as Metastable, a critical ontological stance of a social system. Lastly, in chapter 3 (Borders as Performance), we finally visit Mustang. The chapter progresses in the same manner as that of my trip to various places in and around Mustang and unfolds gradually constructing itself in the backdrop of intended theoretical constructs. It gives an account of the present conditions at Mustang, and the various scales in which border as a phenomenon is performed by a myriad of natural and human agencies and actors. Together with the chapters, as we move towards the conclusions (Architecture of Liminality), we argue on the possible states of Architecture as an agency that can operate within such a performatively messy, polyphonic and a dialectical landscape of contradictory forces.

The region of Mustang and the Salt Route, Nepal

Introduction

I would begin by recollecting one discussion which I had a couple years back, in my formative years at my college, with Prof. Mustansir Dalvi, when he asked me whether I knew where I come from. I refrained from answering in haste, and rather responded with a curious chuckle. Humbly acknowledging that I was truly unaware of my origins per se, we soon delightfully agreed to accept and come to terms with the fact that we and are our identities are indeed extremely fluid. We evolve with and within a relentless flux, that does not let us simply be, but incessantly change with time. “It is all on the edge, and so are we”, as he said. I would say, the research grounds itself on an edge, and in fact also a little beyond the edge, in an in-betweenness where it compels me, the researcher, and the reader to accept the primacy of change, and inspires the premise of the academic exploration of this thesis to critically appreciate flux. This discussion not only spurred a perspective in the way I look at the discipline of architecture today, but also reified my past and ongoing artistic intrigue, especially through music. The quest to be on the edge took me to Nepal ( January 2021-August 2021), where I was engaged as an intern with a socially and environmentally rooted architectural studio named ABARI, working closely with the indigenous communities of Nepal, and exploring the confluence of the vernacular and the modern. During the course of my professional internship, I was offered an unparalleled opportunity to work with his highness Guru Chogyal Rinpoche, and design for his long envisioned project of a monastery for young monks in the bosom of the Himalayas. It was supposed to be completely done in Bamboo and rammed earth, which would make it the first Buddhist monastery in Nepal to be built solely with the traditional construction methods of the Himalayan tradition. I was given the entire task of design, prototyping and eventually executing it on site. I travelled all across the mainland Nepal and on the hills, with the building team of ABARI, who were Tharus, the tribals from far west Nepal (Figure 1). We stayed together at various locations where we made prototypes, did structural design, material testing, and eventually were led to the site, where the Monastery was to be built. The immersive of process of engaging myself in a foreign land, with unknown people, for a collective cause that was manifesting as architecture, brought in several jolts of enquiries. I often encountered situations and sights that shattered some of my foundational beliefs. I was constantly asking myself with utter awe, “how could this even work?” or “How can such a thing exist today?”. As I embedded myself even more within the community, by learning their language, cooked with them, shared stories, I realised the excitement of being a transcultural hybrid, exploring and experiencing liminality across various dimensions of social and cultural life.

This research illuminates a grain of the culturally complex landscape of Mustang. We are particularly happy to contribute to the otherwise sparse canon of work on Mustang, for the region itself remained closed for foreigners until 1992. Moreover, Himalayas in the present literature, have been looked at from singular perspectives that mystify them as ‘pure’, inaccessible, and sacred places which was largely an outcome of the colonial perspective. We, in this research, intend to depart from this reductionist outlook, and intend to foster a critical discussion on the magnificence of the Himalayan landscapes as discursive spaces of continuous flux, transformation, and transcendence.

Figure 1: A photograph of the author with the local Nepalese community on a site in Nepal while interning for ABARI, Nepal. (photograph by a team member at ABARI)

A photograph by the author while travelling on the Salt Route to Mustang, along the Kali Gandaki River

My trip to Mustang was exceptional as there had been no tourists there since the onset of the pandemic, and I was given a special permission by the district office to visit only a few villages in Lower Mustang. However, since the construction of the motorable road, and the ease of access and movement in such terrains, Mustang has become a prime tourist attraction for not only Nepalese, but also for the world.

Figure 33: Jomsom as seen from a hilltop (photograph by the author)

Trucks Replace Mules

The motorable road I travelled from Pokhara to get to Jomsom effectively takes a day, or even a few hours, provided there are no landslides. The trans Himalayan spaces, historically, never had such road networks, but simply had unpaved trails that were trudged by the people, yaks, mules. About a decade ago, it took 22 days to reach from Pokhara to Jomsom on foot, tells Cornelia, an old friend of mine who was a social worker in Nepal. The road indeed saved me a lot of time; however, it has underlying effects on the larger social and physical landscape of Mustang, which we shall discuss in this section. The Beni-Jomsom Road, that further connects to the Korala border in Upper Mustang, cuts through the village of Jomsom, creating an axial physical divide in the linear arrangement of settlements (Figure 33). The hotel that I stayed in was right on the edge of the road, thus offered me a frontage to observe the ways in which the road materially interacts with its surroundings (Figure 34). Firstly, almost all day, until evening 4, the roads are constantly occupied by moving trucks and jeeps coming from Pokhara and Kathmandu. The trucks carry cement, aggregate and sand, and deliver it all the way up to Lo-Manthang and Korala, where the construction is currently taking place. They also carry gas cylinders, food items like rice and dal, which they deliver to the smaller villages around Jomsom, Kagbeni and Upper Mustang (Figure 35). Throughout the day, the main street of Jomsom is filled grunts of engine and with plumes of smoke and dust as the vehicles drive past. The people, thus, mostly spend their time being inside their houses to avoid the cacophony on roads, and only get out in the evening when the vehicular movement comes to a pause. At night, the truck drivers and labours have their meals in the hotels along the street, some of whom I across in my hotel as well. They belonged to different parts of Nepal, a few from the Indian border and even from India. The road construction, as they told, started a few years back and has been getting constructed at an increasingly fast pace (Figure 36). It is observed that this road is only concerned to connect the end points of its itinerary, which are Pokhara and Korala, the former being a centrally located city in Kathmandu and the latter being the China border. It is thus rightly termed as a corridor, which can be abstracted as a string that begins at a point and runs to particular destination, affecting the places it passes through. It creates specific and directed forms of exclusion and restriction. This could be observed in the social life around the street that gets severely hindered, as the elderly now cannot walk freely on the streets, the monks are seen wearing a scarf around their face to avoid the smoke, and the kids that desperately play in front of their houses have to be always monitored their mothers and are often dragged inside their cosy courtyards Figure 37, Figure 38 and Figure 39). These border corridors, therefore, not only enhance mobility across the region of Mustang, but also become material practices that produce social exclusion and spaces of containment. Even though they enhance the flows of capital and resource and create relations the borders, they subliminally manifest as power corridors that act as conduits to direct and channelize geo-political power, as shown in Figure 37 (Murton & Lord, 2020).

Figure 34: The Beni-Jomsom Road as seen from in-front of my hotel in Jomsom. (photograph by the author)

Figure 35: Trucks carrying cement from Beni to Korala as seen on the Beni-Korala road in Jomsom (photograph by the author)

Figure 36: A hoarding at Jomsom photographed by the author showing the development of the Jomsom-Korala road (photograph by the author)

The road, however, was revealed to me as a dialectic, rather than having a singular perception. It does provide service to the communities, but at a significant social and environmental cost. When I interacted with the local shopkeepers and hoteliers, they seemed grateful to the administration to have brought in the road, as it brings more influx of people, not only foreigners but also people from surrounding districts, that supports their local businesses. Communities from smaller remote villages like Phalek and Pagling in lower Mustang also frequently use this road to reach Jomsom or descend to Pokhara. It gives them efficient access to the markets, health facilities, recreation, education. I encountered many such villagers whom I saw using the ATMs in Jomsom, as Jomsom is the only town in Mustang which has an ATM facility. Moreover, for winters migration, the roads are used by school busses to take students to the cities. It also allows the transportation of local goods like apple, maze, potato and barley to and from other parts of the country. For example, the rice and dal that I had as a part of my meals, was transported from Pokhara. When there were no roads, it used to take about six days to reach Jomsom from Pokhara, but now takes only a day. On the other hand, the hoteliers along the way to Mustang as I note in the last section, see this road as drastically reducing their businesses. Earlier in the absence of roads, the trekkers used to frequently stopover in the small teahouses along their ways, unlike the present, when people hurry to their destination. On my way, as I interacted with a few local pilgrims travelling from Kathmandu and Pokhara, it suggested that they are particularly enticed by the service of the road. They can now travel with their entire families in much smaller time as compared to the past, when it took almost a week to walk from Pokhara to Jomsom. While the locals and pilgrims favoured the road, the trekkers that I met in Kathmandu, both local and foreigners, expressed disappointment, as they travel all the way to Mustang to not ride smoothly on roads, but to walk and experience the untrampled and unadulterated terrains of the Himalayas. As Yankila Sherpa, a former minister of parliament, who grew up in the remote village of Olangchung Gola, in eastern Nepal says “With roads in place, people are no longer dependent on farming to make ends meet. Mobility has allowed people to access jobs in commercial areas.” One example she cited: “Apples grown in Jumla often decayed before the roads came in. Now with the roads, Jumla apples have a high market value in Kathmandu (Shapiro, 2020).

Figure 37: Trucks heading to the Korala border, passing through Jomsom (photograph by the author)

Figure 38: Kids playing in the courtyard to avooid the smoke on the road (photograph by the author)

As motorised vehicles are gaining popularity, the population of mules has reduced. Some mule owners who I interacted with told that owning a truck is equivalent to the mules owned by about 6 owners, which mean almost 60 mules. Time and Money both are saved in using a vehicle, thus the tradition to hire animals has become extinct. Mules now are largely used by trekkers; at times only to take a photograph with the poor animal.

Figure 39: A Guring women returning home after harvesting buckwheat. Photographed on the Jomsom-Korala Road (photograph by the author)

Since the past 6 years, Technology has phenomenally infiltrated in Mustang, and is because of the road that it could be introduced in such remote region in Nepal. The first thing that I enquired before heading to Mustang was that whether it has network connection. Thankfully, I was informed by my friends in Mustang about the excellent network connectivity Mustang. Mobile data works pretty much everywhere, except in some part of Upper Mustang. Kids and youngsters can be often seen posing for Tiktok videos and other social media. I could in fact continue attending online classes throughout my stay in Mustang. The dissemination of information, both physical and digital, due to the newer technological interventions has enhanced in Mustang in manifold ways (Figure 41).

Figure 40: A schematic sketch showing roads as conduits that do not interact with the settlements (sketch by the author)

The construction of the border corridor and the increase tourism has certainly transformed the region to a cultural melting pot, as compared to its history of being remote and isolated. However, the transformation achieved in ways that has irrevocably inflicted the landscape with growing contradictions. The Annapurna conservation argues that tourism is in fact the most responsible means of inviting development because it increases income and alleviates poverty while rewarding the maintenance of culture (Pecher, 2010). Does it mean that the community of Mustang was poor in the past? Are their traditions incapable of sustaining the landscape and its inherent abundance? There have been cases of sustained disputes between the ACAP and the community, which were narrated to me by the locals, when the ACAP had proposed for a road widening in Jomsom. This would have led to the scraping off the traditionally built houses along the edge of the road, which the villagers vehemently opposed. These events suggest the existence of a stark divide between the bureaucratic institutions and the local communities, in the way they perceive and interact with the landscape of Mustang. Moreover, apparently as the primary stakeholder of the region, they regulate and instruct the way in which people in general are supposed to interact with the landscape. The photograph below captured in the Nepal tourism board shows a set of instructions for tourists visiting any of such restricted area (Figure 42). The indigenous community as well as the bureaucratic institutions like ACAP assert their rights over the land, its people and resources, but whom does it belong to truly, is what we ask in this this discussion. Who is indeed an outsider in Mustang?

Figure 41: New and contemporary technologies seen in Jomsom (photograph by the author)

Figure 42: A set of instructions by the ACAP written at the Nepal tourism board in Kathmandu (photograph by the author)

Conclusions

Nestled in the Trans-Himalayan highlands, a land historically known to be immune to change, Mustang, has revealed us a radically reoriented shape of its contemporary reality. Entangled withing a web of natural and human forces, Mustang today constructs itself through a relentless performance of borders across its social and material realms and emerges as a territory under various hegemonic voices of control. Once a land of the Lobas and Thakalis, is a restricted area today, and is contested over a myriad of national and international stakeholders. With increased recent state driven geographical imaginaries, we observed how political narratives articulate infrastructure and in turn severely inflicts the quotidian. It seems that the ones who have truly built the landscape, don’t own it. And, the ones, who should be owning it, don’t control it. Whom does Mustang belong to, is an irreconcilable enquiry that we continue make at this stage? We argue that Mustang and its present reality is far from immunity, and is rather infected with insinuating external agents, that are subliminally instigating the landscape with contradictions. The polarised forces suspend Mustang and its traditions into a critical Liminality and bring its cultural history to a fringe of a metastable equilibrium, that continues to evolve with ever increasing turbulence. In this background, we shall now address the research questions with which we began our larger enquiry. How do permanence of the architecture and mobility of the trade route meet? The village of Kagebni and the Kali Gandaki river (photograph by the author)

Blurred Boundaries

“Everything is becoming Chinese now”, said Prem Bahadur Jee, who owned a small general store in Jomsom. I had dropped into his shop to buy some local apples from Marpha, when I saw an eclectic cupboard in front, with a spectrum of objects, out of which only a handful belonged to Mustang, like the apple brandy from Marpha, but rest all were from beyond. Packets of noodles and chips coming from China, Pringles, biscuits, bottles of coke coming from Pokhara, and lying down humbly were local green apples and some dried apple chips (Figure 66). To my surprise, When I asked the fellow customer, the shoes that he had pulled on, a pair of glossy red and green sneakers, came from China. Even the cutlery which I was served food in everyday, the white ceramic ware, was all Chinese. A four-stroke motorcycle, for which one would spend 7 lacs Nepali rupees if bought in Nepal, could be purchased for just about 2 lacs from across the border . All objects, animate or inanimate are intrinsically liminal in Mustang. Even if I was an outsider, I had no choice but to negotiate the hybridity that pervaded the landscape on virtually all dimensions in its social, cultural and environmental realms. Years ago, Mule caravans carried salt from Tibet, and today, trucks transport Chinese goods. While for many years the transborder trade was put to a drastic end after 1960s, however, the trading and mobility practices were resumed in 2012, when the Chinese state officially recognised the Korala border as a transborder route. Since then, every year, the border is opened only for a couple weeks, and a trade fair named Tsongra, is held at Korala. Tsongra is not only a trade fair, but an event for cross-cultural exchange, and most of the goods like utensils, electronics, shoes, etc enter Mustang through this cross-border trade fair (Figure 67). I had originally planned to trek all the way up to the Korala border, located north of Lo-Manthang in Upper Mustang. It is approximately a ten-day trek from Kagbeni, along the Korala-Jomsom road. However, because of increased restrictions due to the pandemic, the Nepal tourism board and the ACAP did not issue me the permits. “it’s not a good idea to go there…”, was how the local community responded, when I enquired on the possibility of visiting Korala. People relatedly urged me to avoid getting closer to the Chinese border. Upon further investigation, I found that China has recently marked the border with an array of concrete pillars and has fenced it. Moreover, at intermittent locations, they have put cameras for continuous vigilance. Most of the people from Upper Mustang are scared to approach and come in the close proximity of the border. The land is Nepali, but the Chinese control it. The border at Mustang, which we looked at as an interface, today witnesses conditions of severe opacities. This brings our discourse to a critical pause, where we witness the landscape of Mustang as a site of sustained contradictions, which we shall explore in the next section.

This questioned was largely addressed during our trip to Mustang. We travelled on the salt route, and along our way encountered places that offered us a sojourn. These places, which were households of the Thakalis, even in the ancient times, served as permanent nodes that acted as points of departure for the mobile traders. The settlements with their spatial permanence, interacted with the spatial mobility of the traders, thus becoming places of continuous flux within them. They could be abstracted as sponges, which invited movement through them, but themselves remained stationary. Through these settlements the physical movement of people and goods catalysed cultural flows as well, making these households as vibrant melting pots. Even though architecture may seem spatially permanent, the movement of animate and inanimate objects through it bring inherent mobility into the built form, thus making architecture as a liminal object, temporally impermanent. How does architecture mediate between everyday life/quotidian and the presence of state imaginaries? In contrast to historical practices of mobility on routes, the newer state driven road infrastructure has greatly impacted the life and livelihoods along the trade routes. The routes, as we note, passed through the settlements, creating an interdependence of the mobile traders with the households. There existed a social dialogue between the architecture and the route that fostered the trade. However, we argue that the new roads manifest as conduits, that simply aim to connect the centres of the city to international borders, creating vectors for spatial operations of geopolitical powers. We witnessed during our stay at the Thak Khola region that the roads have significantly reduced the number of travellers staying over intermittently at teahouses and hotels owned by the Thakalis. Further as we observe in Jomsom, the road has critically disrupted the everyday life of the citizens, creating spaces of social and economic exclusion and containment. Thus, the presence of state imaginaries has largely impacted the material practices of the borderland region, reconfiguring architecture and the life around it in myriad ways.

Figure 66: A shelf at a shop in Jomsom with products from China and Nepal and local apples from Mustang (photographs by the author)

Figure 67: Trongra Fest happening at Likse near Korala border in Upper Mustang (Murton, 2011)

How can the interstitial ambiguity of Mustang engender novel spatial and organisational patterns? Firstly, it is imperative to foreground the causes of the ambiguity of the region of Mustang. Historically, a cultural landscape which was owned by the Lobas and Thakalis, presently lies under the control of the Annapurna Conservation Area. Today, with increased Chinese influence on the Nepalese has radically shifted notions of national development. Infrastructural initiatives and road building has critically impacted livelihoods, creating polarities and spaces of socio-spatial containment across the borderland. Recent technological advances and infiltration of foreign objects into the landscape have changed the outlook of the local people towards their land and culture. Moreover, climatic variation since the past one decade has resulted into completely altered materiality of the region. These causes together give rise to a layered, ecologically ambiguous and complex polyphony, which Mustang and its people experience today. Along with the community of Mustang, we ground ourselves without a ground, and offer an interstice through our design that engenders spatial and organisation organisational patterns that provoke dialogues within and beyond Mustang.

An Unsentimental View

A seminal shift in modern science occurred when objects under concern were looked at as open systems, as opposed to the Classical view. The classical view, assumed and aimed for the isolation of the object as much as possible, in order to understand the object in its present state, and to foresee its transformation in the future. The object and its properties, thus were considered to be largely an outcome of the internal forces that emerged from inside the system, whereas all other external contingencies were considered random and inconsequential to the object and its existence. Our approach in this research adheres to the former perspective that seeks to comprehend Mustang as an open system, which, through its interfaces, is simultaneously shaped by its internal as well as external conditions. Moreover, we observe and establish that some forces, even though originate as external, over time, reconstruct themselves, manifest and disguise as internal forces, which seem to inherently belong to the system. Enmeshed within such growing contradictions, Mustang, thus, more than simply an open system, emerges today as a dialectic in itself.

Along the Kali Gandaki river (photograph by the author)

How can architecture harness the endogenous capacities of Mustang and interweave the local narratives and the broader geopolitical context? This question concerns our response through the agency of architecture to the present condition of Mustang. The research has consistently acknowledged change, and so would our response through design do. Mustang is under a transition, where we could see its traditions fading away, and newer voices of transformation emerging within the landscape. The apparently external forces that have brought in changes in the landscape, are now embedded within it. They now belong to the system and add to its intrinsic tendency to appreciate and welcome change. Traditions no longer seem to be static in Mustang but evolve as the time demands. This juncture in the discussion reinforces impermanence as a condition that pervades all aspects of material and social organisations, thus revealing liminality of Mustang not only in space but also in time. We build on this discussion further in the next section and propose our disposition as designers in such temporally sensitive setting of Mustang. How can architecture be resilient to an ecological uncertainty? The primacy of change in an ecological system, is ineluctably coupled with indeterminacy and uncertainty. A circumstance, where the consequent in unknown, suspends us, the research, and Mustang together in a critical liminal condition. The in-betweenness makes our premise vulnerable and indecisive, however illuminates potential sites of transformation. Through architecture, we would like to capitalise this indeterminacy, and respond by improvising with the changing cultural, political and environmental conditions, continually reinventing ourselves and our actions with time. Material and social resilience would come by being on the border and avoiding a retreat to any particular side. How does the present liminal conditions of Mustang refashion the ethics of the region? Mustang is an active site of border making. Every act of differentiation creates boundaries and differences, which further produces inbetween spaces of hybridity. Every stakeholder of Mustang that intends to enact authority over the landscape- be it the ACAP, the local village development committee, the local community- perceives and interacts with it differently. In the process, they craft their own niches values and ethics, that they believe would benefit the community and its livelihood. Thus, the ethics that eventually get co-constructed to govern the landscape, continually evolve within a system of growing contradictions. They do not confirm to any specific stakeholder, but become hybrid themselves, mediating the binaries. Mustang and its contemporary reality, therefore, renders itself as muddled within a deluge of dialectics, delicately poised in an ethically liminal position. What will be the newer equilibrium state Mustang will attain in the future? With the current growing national and international initiatives of infrastructural development and conservation of the borderland, the present metastable equilibrium of Mustang apparently susceptible to a complete reorientation. The historical development of Mustang and our speculation of its present disposition suggests an inclination of the region and its people towards authorities that are greater in their capacities and magnitude to mobilize power and control over the landscape. Thus, the autonomy of the indigenous and vernacular can be observed as slowly being refashioned in the presence of various ongoing natural and human induced transformation. Although we have anticipated the inclination, we wouldn’t completely submit to it, but remain poised.

Within the contradiction, however, lies an underlying force, that aims to close the system and indoctrinate the landscape with a hegemonic narration of space and time by reducing the innate interfaces of Mustang as mere conduits to choreograph state scripted imaginaries. The thesis resisting these impeding forces, thrives on the volatile hope to perpetuate the dialectic, and to elude the deterministic organisational forces that aim to thwart the spontaneity of the inherent porosity of Mustang. Neither do we aim to resurface the nostalgia of indigenous Mustang, nor do we wish to succumb to dominance of the state. As we realise, what endures is, mere change; a transient ambivalence that exists on the boundary of a contradiction and its immediate subsequent negation. It is the semblance of continuity and stability that agency of architecture falls prey to. We in this research, offer a critical speculation on the theoretical foundations of spatial discourse and to the traditional disposition of Architecture as stable and permanent. The landscape of Mustang, a dissonant assemblage of fragments of time, continually eroding and resuscitating itself, grounds us without a ground. We acknowledge the absence of a complete and coherent view of the territory of Mustang and argue that the contemporary construction of reality of the borderland is immanently fragile, temporal and heterogenous. The thesis thus resists a retreat into idealism, seeks an intimacy with the dialectic, and leaves architecture as weak, incomplete and imperfect. Towa r d s C r i t i c a l R e g i o n a l i s m

The design intends to create a syncretic microcosm of liminality, that intrepidly confronts and embodies the dialectics that pervade Mustang. Through a spatial public intervention, we would like to create a contact zone that brings together various fronts of the social agency operating within and beyond the landscape. Spatially and programmatically, the design would aim at engaging with a diverse group of people, provoking dialogues across all scales and classes of the community. Mustang is a polyphony, and we position ourselves as a note, that may possibly create unheard social and organisational melodies. Neither do I belong to Mustang, nor does the landscape need me - its future would unfold regardless of our intervention. Thus, we consciously eschew from megalomanic pursuits, and approach our design as an opportunity to not stabilise Mustang, but to stage its tensions. In the process, we would temporally attune ourselves to the capricious present, mediating the autochthonous cultural past of the landscape and pitted against globalising universal standards. (Frampton, 1983) Our design would intend to emerge from within the idiosyncrasies of Mustang, offering a simultaneous deconstruction and reinvention of the infiltrating world culture.

SOUND | COGNITION

RAGAS AS SOFT SYSTEMS Towards a systemic approach of musical conciousness

Personal - Lecture Demonstration and Performance Every morning Guru: My mother

Beginning my day with the Indian Classical tradition of riyaaz, a pre-dawn meditative engagement with a melodic scale, a raga seeks an unconstrained voyage through a spontaneous tapestry of emerging musical events. A raga, is not merely as assortment of notes, but a temporally sensitive emergent system. The form of a raga can never be pre-meditated, but can only be discovered enroute. Its inherent soft and dynamical nature, as Prof. Sanford Kwinter writes, offers the performer a site for an intimate engagement with the raga; a territory wahere an exchange between the performer and the raga happens, and in the process, with time, both are subject to a transformation. The performer is no different from the notes, which comes into being not as isolated, independent unit of information, but exit enmeshed withing a web of tonic, textural and affective relations. The riyaaz continues…

This introspection inspired an intermedial lecture demonstration and performance titled ‘Listening to Spaces’ at my college, that explored the relationships ragas and the discipline of Architecture. Live improvisatory compositions were coupled with a simultaneous visual presentation, which was followed by a theoretical discussion and interaction. Analysing the manifold inter-connections, intersections and overlappings between acoustic, spatial and visual media, this presentation explored the various affective modalities of experience and representation, illuminating a space for shared discourse amongst musicians and architects, and the possible ways in which these independent disciplines can nurture each other.

MATTER | TIME

TRANSIENT TERRITORIES Re-imagining fluids as tectonic composers

Personal - Independent Research April 2020 - August 2020 Mentor- Prof. Sameer Khandekar, IIT Kanpur

This project, through a transdisciplinary enquiry, explores the inherent, morphological oneness between natural dynamical systems and the process of musical composition. Both processes, the former being determined through laws of physics, and the latter through cogonition, follow generative, emergent principles that lead to the evolution of their form. Can a musical composition be re-imagined as a generative cognitive territory that is a populated with notes? The set of mass and momentum Navier-Stokes (NS) equations require an initial condition and a boundary condition to fully describe the flow conditions, so that the unknown quantity such as velocity field of the flow, in space and time, can be obtained from these equations, following the governing laws of natural physics. In a very similar fashion, a musical field can be obtained from some initial conditions and boundary conditions, following the governing laws of ragas, for example in classical music parlance. Often, the evolving phenomenon gets enriched due to the fact that even if the governing laws of the ragas are strictly followed, the initial and boundary conditions of the temporally evolving musical performance is a cognitive function of the individual performer.

Extracting the planar fluid concentration at a particular plane

Grasshopper code for image processing

The differential equation of motion of fluid particles, which is a direct outcome of application of Newtons second law of motion to fluids, which deform under the action of applied stress/force. Simplified and deterministic solutions of NS equation are indeed available for simple low inertia fluid systems, or ‘laminar’ flows. With increasing inertia, the flow becomes progressively more indeterministic, making its journey from ‘laminar’, all the way transiting to highly ‘turbulent’ flows. For the latter case, suitable modifications in the NS-equations are needed to handle the stressdeformation relationship, which becomes increasingly complex. This is akin to bringing an order, within the apparent disorder of the highly turbulent nature of the flow.

These two asymptotes, from laminar to turbulent can be morphologically mapped to deterministic musical notes on one hand (Laminar music) and pure white noise on the other (fully turbulent music). Thus, the spectrum of the differential NS equation provides a very sound basis of imagining music, with the musical notes mapped to the local flow velocities (momentum) or concentration of particles (mass) in the flow.

Dividing the plane into a defined x-y domain

Assigning each concentration range a musical note in the 2.5th dimention

The resulting sequence of notes

Python code for mapping concentration values to musical notes

FLUIDS THAT COMPOSE

Fluids as tectonic mediums can sculpt a spontanously emerging territory in space and time, and can simulatenously create a genererative sequence of musical notes. Once the fluid attains a steady state, the music comes to a gradual hault.

THE TACTILITY OF SOUND

The project further proposes a conceptual installation where the rising fluid/smoke particles would be allowed to come physically into contact with a human body, and simultaneously, the evolving musical composition would be heard. This will push the boundaries of the acoustic experience to a tactile realm, wherein the sound and its emergent properties can be ‘felt’.

Commencing the project with a prayer seeking forgiveness from the mother earth before we trample the land...

MATERIALITY | COMMUNITY

MANDALA Connecting people, craft and the planet

Professional - Internship at ABARI, Nepal January 2021 - August 2021 Mentor - Ar. Nripal Adhikary

In the pursuit of crossing the bounds of my existing notions, this project marks one of my most critical and exciting encounters with a foreign land, its people and its history, eventually manifesting as my first ever built project. Nestled in the bosom of the Himalayas, the Mandala is a Buddhist Monastery of his highness Guru Chogyal Rinpoche and his disciples. The project was initiated during my professional internship at ABARI in Nepal, and since then I have been centrally contributing to its design and execution. The Monastery would be the only one of its kind in the country which, as envisaged, would exemplify a spectacular confluence of the traditional Himalayan architecture and modern engineering. We are delighted to launch it this year. I spent eight months at ABARI, out of which for about 3 months we did prototyping of the designing at the studio at Ramnagar in the Chitwan National Park, and the rest were spent on the site itself. I continue to be engaged with the project during its ongoing construction phase. The following pages illustrate my vivid experiences.

L AMAGAUN, PHARPING , NEPAL

The site is located at an elevation of 1800 m.a.s.l, in small remote village Lamagaun, which is about 50 km southwards from the city of Kathmandu. Vehicular accessibility to the site was limited, with hardly any permanent roads, that reached only up till close to the summit. Thereafter, a narrow pedestrian trail leads to the site. The landscape has an evident transition between deciduos vegetation and Tundra. It is largely populated by Gurungs and ‘Tamangs’, the mongoloid ethnicities of Nepal, with whom me and our building team stayed on the site.

REINVENTING THE VERNACULAR

Honing the synergy of natural building materials like bamboo, rammed earth and contemporary building technology, and inextricably with the flux of opportunities the site has to offer, the project aims at creating a Mandala of geometrical, material and social convergence, and togetherness.

PRATYKASHA PRAMA AN

Borest, quatqui quiaspelibus sum voluptatem. Porepudi occus, ommod quid molorep tatiumquam quibus dit mil maiones enienih iciist, et maxim re ent quia nus dolupta eculpa dolum qui quasimaiorum faccullis saectusae num deris alit atur si dolenit faceperuptas corese necearu ptuscia tecaborepta dipsaperro moloribus is ducium invelic iendigeni necustotat eatem adit de aligene volore, simporesedis am que non cum doloremqui doluptatur? Qui

EMBRACING IMPRECISION

The exercise of prototyping with bamboo, at its core, inculcated in me the tendency to appreciate the inherent nimbleness and flexibility of the material, that overtly embraces errors and imprecision, and invites improvisation. This process evoked the ancient Indian notion of Pratyaksha Pramaan the living evidence, that seeks a departure from the deterministic approach towards material configuration, and adopts a rather intuitive outlook towards structures, their behavior and stability. 1:10 Model, Prototyping at the Studio, Ramnagar, Chitwan, Nepal

BUILDING ON A MOUNTAIN, LIKE A MOUNTAIN

Ramming earth is like building a mountain. With no chemical processes, the technique is solely based on mechanical compression that shapes material configuration.

Foundation Detail

Steel Bracket Detail

‘‘...take a small lump of earth, put it in your mouth. If the earth melts, then you can build a wall with it. ’’ an instruction given to me by Mr. Ahikary while I was on the site. Through A real-time, spontaneous and collaborative exchange with the site and the locals at Lamagaun, I realised that arhitecture becomes reslient not only with its structure and geometry, but also with its intimate engagement with the community, their stories and their voice. The building is not ‘on’ the site, but becomes ‘of ’ the site.

Plucking ‘Koirala’ flowers f rom the surrounding forests for evening dinner with young nuns and Guru Rinpoche

JOY OF VULNERABILITY

Embedding myself in the landscape, I could observe its making and unmaking, and its relentless tranformation in space and time. With various natural and human forces operating, the endevour indeed made all the participants vulnerable. However, it is these vulnerable moments that bring about the best of collective creativity.

L i m i n o i d , Va ra n a s i , I n d i a , 2 0 1 9

Urban Siesta,Dharavi Slums,Mumbai, India, 2019

PHOTOGRAPHY

Guests, Bhaktapur,Nepal,2021

Folds of the Soul, Still Life, Rome, Italy, 2018

Strange Attractors, Hare-Krishna Festival, 2018

PHOTOGRAPHY

Musical Performances

Theatre Making

Short Films

CHAI PE CHARCHA

tea time discussions It’s been a long and tiring day, let us now have a cup of tea. Much before the nicotine and the herb has a chemical effect on the body, the goals of relaxation get already accomplished by the company of the earthen tea-pot and the interface it forms with the sipping lips. The aroma of the tea blends with the aroma of the earth. In the process both lose their individuality. This collective new, kisses the lips, intimately creating the ecological interface through capillary action, reminding us of the supreme primacy of the process. The journey is the goal!