Road Trip Through Rajasthan
PPH
Michael Kennedy
Editorial Team Batsceba Hardy - Chief editor Robert Bannister Michael Kennedy Fabio Balestra Concept Batsceba Hardy Graphic Design Batsceba Hardy Massimo Giacci
Progressive Publishing House All texts and illustrations contained in this book are subjected to copyright. Any form of utilization beyond the narrow limits imposed by the law of copyright and without the express permission of the publisher is forbidden and will be prosecuted. This applies particularly to reproduction, microfilming or the storage and processing in electronic system. Adult Content The photographies on this book are realized by capturing moments of daily life in public places and have been realized without a lucrative purpose with exclusively cultural and artistic intent.
Road Trip Through Rajasthan Michael Kennedy
PPH
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I am a travel junkie, and need to be intermittently on the move. Perhaps my restlessness is the result of incendiary works from my youth, like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road - and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Perhaps this globetrotting results from Irish ancestors who hit the road because of the Great Famine. Perhaps my addiction to travel is simply an antidote to boredom. I care very little where I go so long as it is away. For most of my life I was too dead broke to travel beyond state lines in America, a country where I have not lived for nearly 20 years. Since I chose self-exile in the face of rising Republican Party fascism, I have been traveling like a man on a mission. And these days that mission is to be a street photographer with the world as my office. India called my name last year, and I answered. Actually, India has called my name many times over the years. Yet I ignored this because I did not want to become clinically depressed by seeing beggars everywhere, cows shitting in the streets, people bathing in the Ganges River while the ashes of newly cremated bodies floated by on the journey to somewhere. After all, I had already read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha immediately after listening to The Beatles’ White Album 50 years ago (Oh, my God). Besides, I have racked up countless hours watching Anthony Bourdain as he joyfully took me round the world on the Travel Channel. His loss is so profound. Regardless, off to India I went a year ago in October. *** In my lean days, I camped in cheap Wal-Mart tents in America’s National Parks, checked into sketchy motels in the Montana Badlands where it appeared Norman Bates worked, stayed in dubious Mexican hotels in the heart of the old Aztec Empire where the TV was chained to the wall, and stayed in so many places that I hope to never see again. For India, it was a like an upgrade to Business Class. This meant a private tour guide, a driver and five-star hotels with young female beggars cradling an infant just a stone’s throw away: “Please, meester. Money for baby.” To me, India was like a nasty car accident: disturbing yet fascinating. You don’t want to look; yet you can’t look away. As for street photography, India is a visual overload and everything reminded me of why I picked up a camera almost a halfcentury ago to document the human pageant. I shot too many images last year, and seriously damaged two Nikon bodies in the process. But I could not stop myself.
These days my trusted companion in life has a sense of order that often tests my patience. Naturally, she was shocked and appalled by India (freaked out … to be precise) - cautioning me always to side-step the fresh cow shit in the streets as I walked along in my trademark Birkenstock sandals. After seven days, she said emphatically: “Never again.” *** Two months later - in early February, 2018, she watched a travel program about Rajasthan on Seoul TV and announced: “We must go to Rajasthan.” “The hell you say?” I asked. “Yes. We must see this part of India.” The cliché is true: You never know about women. And so we traveled to India again … exactly a year later, and with the 48-year-old Anil Sharma, of New Delhi - our guide from last year. With me this time were mis tres amigos: Senor Fuji, Senor Nikon, and Senor Ricoh. I will not deny that I have succumbed to Gear Acquisition Syndrome … on occasion. However, I can rationalize things so well that in my best years I should have become a $300-an-hour divorce lawyer (very lucrative in America). Yet all three cameras were a necessary indulgence; much like a golfer who needs at least three clubs for the back nine. Both the Fuji X100F and the Ricoh GR II were for stealth street photography, and the Nikon with a 300mm lens was for street portraits (yes, unconventional … I know). Anil and his side-kick, the ever-dedicated Raj, our driver, picked us up at The Park, our mainstay New Delhi hotel and for the next five days we were on a road trip through Rajasthan, the largest state in India. *** Each night we stayed in a new location: Mandawa, at an old castle converted into a hotel; Pushkar, an old fort turned into a hotel; Jodhpur, at the pseudo-swank Park Plaza; Ranakpur, at a rustic yet charming camp-style hotel; and Udaipur, at the classy Rajputana Hotel. I was not interested in tourist sites. I wanted an authentic experience of India. The benefit of the guide-and-driver routine is that I could say: “Stop. Pull over, I have to photograph these scenes.” There was none of that rubbish about running the tourists through the jewelry factory, the carpet factory, and the schlocky junk item factory that ends up in the landfill back home. With Anil as my guide and chaperone, he could get me inand-out of places where tourists just don’t visit: the narrow warrens, the slums, the railway stations, the roadside restaurants, the barbershops, and the homes of strangers.
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Once, outside Ranakpur, Anil took me to what he called a village. From a Western context, the structures looked like shabby buildings for livestock. Yet this is where families lived, and the men scratched at backbreaking day labor to just exist, the wives raised children and endured beatings from their husbands, and everyone aged quickly only for the cycle to be repeated, generation-aftergeneration. At the first stop a 15-year-old girl, already married with two children, stopped to talk with Anil. Further along the path - for there are no roads, no vehicles, and no electricity … a 34-year-old grandmother had just finished cleaning out the pen for the milk cow. And even further along the path … strewn with crushed plastic bottles used for home-made alcohol that the men drank after another day in the fields … the same story: decent people marginalized in the game, doomed to walk the wheel and subsisting like animals. Like so many countries round the world, but especially in what used to be referenced as Indo-China, one must payto-play. There is no such thing as public education. If you can pay school fees, you might know upward mobility. If you can’t pay, you remain in a 19th century world on the train to nowhere. Same as it ever was … same as it ever was. However, for street photography, Rajasthan is a sensory overload and the best open-air market is in Jodhpur. By the time one reaches retirement and there’s no reason to report to the dungeon of some low-level bureaucratic office, or an insurance company extorting money, it is natural to feel jaded and world-weary as you fondle the cheap watch given in thanks for years of playing the game. Yet it’s refreshing some times to be reminded that you can be mildly shocked because you have not seen it all. There is still some innocence to your character. One afternoon, while in the market of Pushkar, a cow stopped before a vegetable stand, and let loose a steady stream of urine. I was disgusted. But I was even more disgusted when the middle-aged male vendor stretched out his hand for a splash of warm cow urine, and then sprinkled it across his face like holy water. “What the fuck is that all about?” I asked Anil. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a thing.” “In India, everything is possible.” “Yes, my friend. This is true.”
After Rajasthan there was a day in the slums of Mumbai, and a quick side-trip to Katmandu, before meeting up with Anil in New Delhi for a day across the sacred Yamuna River that separates New and Old Delhi, where many of the vendors in the vegetable market were at the same stations as last year. Same as it ever was. For my second trip to India I was not quite so jolted by the sights and sounds and smells as the first encounter. And yet there is no place like India. Before I left, Anil said: “You will be back same time next year.” This was more statement than question. “You could be right,” I said. My better half, who suggested we take on this grand adventure, said: “No more India. It’s too dirty and too crazy. But you will return - yes?” I only smiled.
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Rajasthan is considered the jewel in India’s crown, and with good reason. The largest state by area in India is the quintessential land of maharajas and medieval forts, palaces and tigers, and vibrant festivals. The mix of culture, history, architecture and nature is wonderfully enchanting. Officially, India has a population of 1.3 billion, and 77 million live in Rajasthan, which is located in the northwestern part of the country - sharing a border with Pakistan. The wide and inhospitable Thar Desert, also known as The Great Indian Desert, forms a natural boundary between India and Pakistan.
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In Sanskrit, the word raj is derivative of raja - or “king�, and sthan means land, so Rajasthan literally means Land of Kings in the Indian culture.
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Just as the Germanic language groups have left an indelible mark on European place names that outstrip the legacy of the Roman Empire, starting with Deutschland, Finland, Switzerland, Netherlands, England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland - the Sanskrit language groups (especially Indo-Persian) have played a similar role in Central Asia with place names like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
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To recount the many outside cultures that attempted to conquer or dominate Rajasthan and the rest of India over several millenniums is impossible in a just a few paragraphs. It is stating the obvious that all these circumstances had a profound effect on shaping modern-day India – with the British Empire being the most recent example in a fascinating and lengthy history. With a population of 3m, the largest city in Rajasthan is Jaipur - which also serves as the state capital. Other places to visit include Jodhpur, which has the most amazing open market, and Pushkar on the border of the Thar Desert, where an annual camel fair occurs in the first week of November. Whether a photographer, or a travel junkie (or both), Rajasthan is the place to go.
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Call me Kennedy. I am an American - St. Louis born, that baseball and beer-loving city on the milewide Mississippi River. Early on I knew I wanted to be a writer because writers were elegantly louche. As St. Louis bad boy William Burroughs sardonically noted, they lounged around Singapore and Bangkok smoking opium in yellow pongee silk suits. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful servant boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. This was the life for me. Yet I showed little academic promise in my youth, barely graduated high school and finally emerged from college after prolonging my adolescence for the better part of a decade in the 1970s. Like many aspiring writers, it made sense to work for newspapers. I had a lively interest in the morbid and the abnormal. I also had an appetite for the extreme and the sensational, for the slimy and the unwholesome. I felt at ease among people who were liars, sluts, crooks, morons, cretins, perverts and obsessives. Over a 20-year period, I worked for small town American newspapers in Montana, New Mexico and Oklahoma - primarily owned by publishers who were either alcoholics or sex addicts. This period of life was what I desperately needed, as I tried to put my misspent youth in the rearview mirror. What I had not counted on is how I fell profoundly in love with photography. And, in that bygone era, this meant constant access to Tri-X film, a definition of heaven superior to any previous ideals. Labels are a drag - yet if I must adhere to a frame of reference for some context, I’ll go with photojournalist - which is inclusive of both documentary and street photography, and allows visuals to compliment and reinforce written discourse. My days in photojournalism ended over 20 years ago. In fact, I put my cameras away for a decade and had no further connection with my former world. Yet - true love is what it is, and now I have returned home like Odysseus to find Penelope still waiting for me. That’s a little overly dramatic, because my Canon F-1 from 1976 is now a bookend, and my mainstay system is the Nikon D5300. Yet a Penelope is a Penelope is a Penelope (right, Gertrude?). The truth is I’m still susceptible to falling in love, and lately I’ve been having a grand time with the Ricoh GR II. Call me a fanboy. I’m delightfully shocked by how lightweight and stealth the camera is for street photography. And yet the gear doesn’t change my motivation. I have no profound explanation for why I do what I do … for why I have this addiction to use a camera to document people on the street doing what they do … “some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives, don’t know how it all got started, I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives.” To say more would “pluck out the heart of my mystery.” Yet the entire experience is a dazzling reminder of a genuine connection to this human tapestry, full of stories both common and unique, stories full of hope and heartbreak, stories full of solace and souls too soon forgotten, from the streets of Barcelona-to-the streets of Varanasi. Have camera, will travel.
PPH