I am now at Godawari, near Kathmandu, where I will be staying for the next 8 weeks. I will be teaching sculpture to girls who have been rescued from circuses in India, they were sold to the circuses by their families.
Teaching sculpture to Nepali girls who do not understand English and have no experience of Art. That is a challenge greater than the Char Dham, which now seems a distant dream. But I hope that my time here will give me time to reflect on that experience.
Back to India
1st July Haridwar The Ganga Arti is the nightly ritual on the Har Ki Pari, the main bathing ghat on the river. It is an ancient ritual of bringing fire to the river at dusk, bringing light and warmth into the night. We had whitnessed this ceremony a couple of times when we were here in 2005 and it is strictly speaking something that you should do before embarking on the Char Dham. I think that we went with a mind to record it, in the hope of getting material for use in later work, but crammed on the ghat with many other pilgrims, cajoled by the attendants to give donations for the upkeep of the ghats one is caught up in the atmosphere of the thing. As the sun begins to sink the God of day is bought out from their temple, the amplified music starts to build and people raise their arms in the air, Jai, they shout. Then the sacred flames are bought down to the river bank and all the bells in all the temples in the town start to ring. For a few brief moments all is noise and light. Then the flame is bought amongst the crowds and people sale their banana leaf boats of flowers and flames down the river. I struggled to raise the video camera over the heads of those in front of me. I think I got some reasonable footage. Adrian has an easier time really, once the microphone is set up he can still look and listen. The sense of separation that the camera lens gives you is difficult to deal with sometimes. To always see mediated by the lens. Essentially I think the experience of being there is the most valuable material we gathered, this, like many rituals seems to get better every time that you see it. It is so theatrical, the building of tension, the attendants working the crowd, the anticipation. People travel from all over India for this ceremony and you are sucked in by their enthusiasm for it. Haridwar is a fascinating place, a mixture of spiritual and end of the peer and it seemed fitting that filming the Aarti I was using up a bit of tape from England that had Brighton Peer on it.
