India Textile Tour---Day 14

The last day in India, and I'm not sure how long the day has been, as I sit in Dulles Airport whiling away the hours until my flight home.  My watch is still on India time and it says 9:45, so that would be night time in India.  I have been up pretty much since 7:00 AM yesterday, I think, so that's about 39 hours?

We hung around the resort until 3:30 PM and then had our bus ride to Chennai Airport, then hung around the airport until time to leave on Emirates.  The plane was late leaving on the 4 hours or so flight to Dubai.  This meant we were going to be late getting into Dubai, which meant our two hour layover was going to be less than that.  Turns out Dubai Airport is really busy on Friday night, so we circled for about 45 minutes...now we had not time on lay over at all.

By the time we finally landed we were so late that we had a separate bus for all the passengers attempting to connect with the flight to Washington.  A long ride through the airport where we were sure the driver was lost and was trying to find the right plane...almost had a ride to Washington without the plane!  Finally arrived where we were supposed to be, up the escalator and then a long walk to the correct gate...where I got the random security check pull aside.  I was almost the last person on the plane, then we waited, this time for our luggage to catch up with us.  Finally took off more than two hours late. 

The flight from Dubai to Washington is 14 hours and miracle of miracles, I actually slept on the plane.  The seat next to me was empty so I could brace my head on it, and with my Bose sound-cancelling headphones playing "Oriental Meditation" music I actually went to sleep.  The Bose headphones are worth every penny I spent on them, made the flight almost soundless.  Two meals and a snack later, we are in the US.

Arrived at Dulles late, but that doesn't matter to me because I have a late flight to San Francisco.  Immigration is pretty much automated, with kiosks where you scan your own passport, then present the printout to the immigration officer, no sweat.  After getting my baggage (yes, Emirates did manage to transfer everything!), Customs was just as easy.  This was nothing like my last experience in Los Angeles, the worst!

India Textile Tour---Day 13

Another lovely frangipani

An Indian crow

The tuktuk ride

My feet, the Bay of Bengal

Happy spider

A day of relaxation, no bus trip, no nothing except the heat and the humidity.  After breakfast Janet and I walked to the beach to stick our feet in the Indian Ocean, here called Bay of Bengal---I figure same ocean.  Totally sweat drenched, we went back to our a/c room.  In the afternoon we walked into the main part of town to see what we could see (and buy), and took a tuktuk back because we were totally sweat drenched again.  Nice to have a day to do nothing.

Breakfast: watermelon, egg, bacon

upma and pongal

Lady making the hair pieces South Indian women wear

Don't know what the flowers are, but they smell wonderful

Get your skin or sex problems solved here

The bangle seller

Snack shop, mostly all deep-fat fried

India Textile Tour---Day 12

Up early for a trip to the town of Srikalahasti, which has an important temple to Shiva, but also has kalamkari artists, which is why we're going there.

Kalamkari has been made in Andhra Pradesh for centuries and has many practitioners in this area. We visited two workshops and saw the fabric both being drawn on by the kalam as well being dyed by painting and also mordant being applied. The method is exactly the same as the chintz we saw in Bangalore up to a point. There did not seem to be any wax resist used in Srikalahasti.

Holi dyes already available

It took us four hours to reach here, and the journey in itself was interesting. Nice to get out of the city and see the countryside. Hot in Srikalahasti, but lower humidity, which made it feel more like California, and thus bearable. We saw tons of mango orchards, but not in season yet, bitter melon “yards,” peanuts and rice, plus lots of Indian goats, water buffalo and cows. Also saw the Eastern Ghats, a rocky mountain range in this part of India---although I would call them high hills.

Eastern Ghats rice in foreground

Lunch was interesting, at the MGM Grand, no less. Wonder if the MGM Grand knows there's a hotel in Srikalahasti named the MGM Grand, with a lion as their icon? Doubt it. Only thing available was a full South Indian thali tray, which was good, even if spicy hot.

Bus ride, although air conditioned, was torturous, not to mention butt-numbing. Traffic was at times miserable, plus we had to stop at the border of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to pay taxes based on the number of passengers on the bus...interesting. More torturous though was the fact we had to do it all over again to get back to the hotel.

Materials used in kalamkari:

white lump is alum, brown in

center jaggery (sugar) others

various plant materials

Jonnalagadda Niranjan, a 5th generation artist

Detail, tree of life

Tree of life

Pen work already done, and mordant

for madder (red dye) also done. Black

background being painted in with dye.

Drawing the design, first with charcoal before pen work

A religious panel, detail

National award winner for kalamkari

Adding mordant for madder

 Sorry about the order, but the program will not let me move pictures around as I like.

India Textile Tour---Day 11

Another interior flight in India, this one the last one, and this on on Air India instead of IndiGo. Nicer because, although only one piece of luggage is allowed, the weight limit is higher. So its off to Chennai, formerly Madras, on the famed Coromandel Coast.

We are actually staying a a resort on the coast south of Chennai, in a small town called Mamallipuram, also known as Mahabalipuram, in Tamil Nadu state, where the language is Tamil. Since we had had a box lunch from a hotel in Chennai on our way here, we wasted no time with a meal, but checked in and then immediately went out sight seeing.

First stop was the Five Rathas which are monolithic rock carvings consisting of five chariot representations carved out of pink granite. Apparently, although mistakenly referred to as temples, they have no religious significance and are unfinished as the prime mover behind the carvings died before they could be finished. They date from the 5^th to the 7^th centuries. There is also a freestanding elephant.

The elephant and I

Next stop was Arjuna's Penance, another monolithic rock carving. It is said to represent the descent of the Ganges River from heaven, all watched by more than a hundred carved figures of gods, goddesses, semi-gods, humans, and animals, including nearly life sized elephants. Again, this is 7^th century work, and now part of the World Heritage site called the Group of Monuments at Mahabalipuram.

Life size-milking the cow

Near life-sized elephants

A short walk away is Krishna's Butterball, a 250-ton balanced rock. It also looks like an erratic from glacial activity. The slope is so slippery the local kids were using it as a slide, great fun to watch.

Our final stop is the Shore Temple, also part of the World Heritage Site. It too was built in the 8^th century, 700-728 to be exact, when this area was a busy port. Unlike the monolithic carving of the other sites we saw today, this is built of blocks of granite. It was not damaged by the tsunami 2004, although the water reached and flooded the area, in fact, although Mahabalipuram was affected by the tsunami, I see no evidence of it today.

The weather here is miserable, at least to this California gal. Hot and humid, the high today was in the 90's, with “feel like” temperatures in the low 100's.

Shore Temple, Bay of Bengal behind

India Textile Tour ---Day 10

Today a trip to the outer environs of Bangalore, to Renuka Reddy's Redtree Handcrafted Textiles Studio. Because her studio uses intricate resist-dyeing techniques, in addition to hand-painting with a kalem (a very thin bamboo pen) on hand-spun and hand-woven cotton, she believes what she is doing is unique. I would say not only unique but exceptionally beautiful. There is literally no one left in the world who knows how to make chintz in the traditional way, so everything Renuka does is an experiment, and she has notebooks filled with results.

A lesson on fabric prep

She demonstrated, step by step, what she has discovered so far. Her biggest sticking point at this time is finding some way to make fine wax lines before the wax solidifies and she can't draw without heating up the instrument. To make the chintz she must first beat (with a child's cricket bat) the fabric, then soak it overnight in dung, then wash and beat it again. A soaking in buffalo milk (and it must be buffalo milk because of the fat content) washing and rubbing to smooth the cloth, and its finally ready for painting. The thin black lines are drawn using the kalem and ink made from iron rust and jaggery (raw Indian sugar). Colors are added, some with mordant (a substance used to set dyes on fabrics by forming a chemical bond with the dye which then attaches to the fabric), some with wax resist. This is getting to technical!! I'll stop now with the heavy stuff.

After leaving Renuka's studio we had lunch and then saw three guys in a very, very small shop weaving silk, and then went shopping. Lots of walking involved, plus the usual Indian steps, all the wrong size and made out of marble so sometimes slippery.

A chintz by Renuka Reddy

Renuka's mom is a quilter

Show and tell in Bangalore

Showing the goods

An incredibly tiny, hot

noisy silk weaving shop

India Textile Tour---Day 9

Best garland yet

Indian electric car

Random guy, Indian bus

Light Sunday traffic

Construction everywhere

Off in the distance, lots more apartments

Another plane flight today, this time from Ahmadabad to Bengaluru, which was formerly known as Bangalore, and is still referred to by this name. It is the capital of the state of Karnataka, and has become India's Silicon Valley or IT capital. High rise apartments are shooting up like mushrooms, and there is construction everywhere. At 3000 feet above sea level, the temperature here seems more moderate than in Ahmadabad or Jaipur. This time we are staying in an anonymous type hotel---could be anywhere in the world. The last two hotels were certainly special. Since today is Sunday, we have the rest of the day at leisure.

Textile Tour --Day 8

 

A day devoted to the Calico Museum, a place I had never heard of before this trip, and did not realize what a treasure it was until I saw it. Founded in 1949 by Shri Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai and the textile house Calico, the museum has now constrained itself to handicraft textiles and publications such as Historical Textiles Of India under the editorship of John Irwin, and, under the editorial direction of Dr Alfred Bühler, Contemporary Textile Craft Survey of India.

The Haveli within which the museum is housed.

I know that what we call calico west is the small flowered print very popular in the 60's. However here calico refers to the fabrics (and now handicrafts), at one time only from the town of Calicut but now anywhere. The Calico Museum is  extremely strict about photos, and you are not allowed to carry either a camera or a mobile phone into the museum. Fortunately there are images on the internet, so I claim credit for none of the following.

 

Patkas

15th to 19th century calico

Costumes, all in plastic to protect them

 

Rooms and rooms and rooms...overwhelming

 We later went to an evening market where most things sold were clothes and related items, like shoes and costume jewelry.  Dinner on the roof of the hotel followed.  A full day, thank goodness not as hot as the first day here, and I'm feeling almost normal.

Milkweed flower, a real weed everywhere here

Ahmendabad night from the roof

Janet showing her moves with the local dancer

The skirt seller