Day 8

10.30am
Today is a holiday for everyone and a festival for the Moslem House (Ramazan). We arrange to meet the children in the Activity Room at 10.30 and they are there waiting for us long before we get there.

We take two cameras around the village, which was one of the things they mentioned on the first day they wanted to photograph and this is the first time we have had daylight hours to do it. They take us to the duck pond, to the rose garden and to the village entrance. And along the way, as always, they improvise when the opportunity arises. They can’t resist posing with the statue of Hermann Gmeiner, with the staff motorcycles and next to the Village car. The gate Watchman, tries to control them and keep them off the garden, but they are simply too quick, so he takes the opportunity to tell me that he was for many years in the British Army, and was stationed in England and Scotland, and served in Rhodesia and Nepal, and proudly formed part of an honour guard for the Queen when she visited India.

Nandini is on her own photographing the pond when she stops, holds the camera at arm’s length, turns it to point at herself and releases the shutter. I can’t see what prompted this sudden reversal of the direction of gaze. Is what she has in mind to turn the camera from an instrument for looking outwards towards the world, to look instead introspectively? I think there is something more to this moment than chance, and when later, I look at the image I am even more sure of it. For Nandini, normally the human dynamo, leaping from one thing to another, treating the world as an infinite collection of things to play with, in every other picture grinning from ear to ear, is here, her face lit up, suddenly caught in a moment of introspection, seeing herself as part of this world of tricks and games and improvised toys.

Two minutes later, when they notice one of the House Mothers drying rice on the grass, the others see this as yet another photo-opportunity in which to pose. But Nandini photographs the rice and the rhagi in a large pot. I suspect she has a different way of looking at the world compared to the others. She is naturally curious about objects, there is something of the scientist in her I feel.

We go back to the Activity Hall, where Shobha continues with the interviews that she began yesterday and I set up the laptop, at the children’s request, so that they can look through the accumulated slides. The mood today is much more contemplative and less frenetic than usual and there might be several reasons for this, it may be that the children respond well to having two activities running, it may be that they are just getting used to being here with us, and I think perhaps the evening meetings suffer a little from the fact that the children have been in school all day.

I sit for a while with Supriya, Sweatha and Roshini as they look through the slides. They look through slowly and carefully, noticing things they hadn’t noticed before and enjoying looking at the images they now find familiar. They do this for more than an hour. It makes me think that often we don’t give children enough time and space to do this contemplative reviewing of the pictures. Too often we are short of time and show them the images once and expect them to respond immediately. Here I think I am seeing something different. There is, as several writers have observed (John Berger and Susan Sontag come immediately to mind), a close connection between the photograph and memory. Indeed we sometimes take photographs to create a memory when otherwise events would flash by too fast (wedding and holiday photographs, for instance). And when we review photos, one of the things we do is refresh the memories that we have. With time, and repeated viewings, it is the memory of the photograph that sometimes replaces the memory of the event.

As the girls look through the photos, and see again those they like best, there is a simultaneous movement in opposite directions. The image becomes more familiar as their distance from it increases. At the same time they get closer, and yet further away. It is in this tension that looking back at the photos can become a deeply reflective process. In one way, the process is highly invasive, in that the photos challenge them to see themselves as others might see them as opposed to how they see themselves, and yet it is safe, in that the photos have become known and familiar. There are no surprises. They know which images catch them out in their delusions about themselves. ‘That doesn’t look a bit like me!’ one of them cries out.

Perhaps this is an over-interpretation of what the children are doing and perhaps they are not yet of an age where they are conscious of the dynamic relationship between self, and appearances of self. But I think these three girls are at the point of becoming aware. I noticed at the boating lake that they were aware that men were giving them second glances, and that women noticed that men were doing so.

2.30 pm
In the afternoon we take the bus to visit some temples. It is an interesting experience for me as I realise I lack the spiritual imagination that is so much an integral part of Hindu life. I can listen to the stories of the gods, as stories, but when the children talk about a statue, or a plant or a flower, not as a representation or symbol of a god, but as a god, my imagination cannot cope.

Last time I felt so helpless at my inability to understand was when Lynne and I visited Aboriginal sites when we lived in Australia. Aboriginal people would tell us about a natural feature in the landscape, or a cave painting, in terms of creation myth (a dry river bed might be created by the Rainbow serpent as it crossed this country in the dreamtime). We could understand this, at least at a metaphorical level, but as our guides continued talking we realised that they did not mean in it the same way at all. A cave painting of the rainbow serpent is not a representation, it is the rainbow serpent (not a painting of it). And as the story unfolds it becomes, not just a mythical animal but also a group of people for whom this animal is their totem. The climax of the story is the point at which the landscape feature, the people who are the guardians of it (for whom it is their dreaming) and the animals invoked, merge into one seamless whole.

I am not sure how much you can generalise from culture to culture in these matters, but I certainly feel that same sense of imaginative helplessness, faced with something that is beyond my grasp. At the Bull Temple there is a massive ‘statue’ of a bull ‘carved’ in granite. But the children (and Shobha) tell me that it hasn’t been carved. It was just like this, which is what makes it of special significance. And later, when we go to the Cave Temple (which is close to the Village), there is a large smooth granite rock which has some scooped out holes that resemble footprints (my reading), but which in Hindu eyes are the footprints of Lard Hunnamartha (the god with face of a monkey), made as he ran across the rock.

For the children the lines between belief, myth and reality are of limited consequence. The children seem to move much more easily between different ways of understanding the world than I can. So, I find myself wondering, what is going on in their minds when they look at a photograph? It would seem that they don’t see the photograph, as Susan Sontag so eloquently put it, as ‘a stencil taken off reality’. The process of taking the picture is not entirely mechanical, there is always an element of magic at work. Nor do they seem to believe, as Susan Sontag claims many people do, that each time a photograph is taken of you, you lose a layer of your soul. As though some essence of you has been stolen. Indeed, when Susan Sontag made a film for BBC TV, based on her book ‘On Photography”, she called the film ‘It’s stolen your face’. In this project something different is going on. Perhaps because we have given the process to the children (it is not us who are ‘taking’ the pictures), the effect is to lead them into different forms of understanding.

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