Encounters that trigger off change
By Adil Jussawalla

SOME journeys converge, even if the travellers don’t know each other. Or they may not know each other well. That’s the case with Mumbai-born Harsh Prabhu and Kanpur-born Randhir Khare. They met each other a few times when they were living in Mumbai.

In their twenties then, they shared a common passion for fiction and poetry but didn’t get to know each other well. In their forties now, their paths converge. If they saw each other’s work they’d realise they once shared a journey without knowing it.

Prabhu is curator of "Some Children of the Dream", a photo-and-text exhibition which has travelled through Australia, surfaced at the original Woodstock near New York and which, after its Mumbai run, will be shown in Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Goa. Khare has written Dangs, an account of his staying with adivasis in Gujarat. Subtitled Journeys into the Heartland, the book will be published this year.

What’s common to both the exhibition and the soon-to-be published book is the source. The exhibition is one result of Prabhu’s 15-month stay with Australian aborigines in the late ‘80s. The book is one result of Khare’s interaction with a group of adivasis in India at around the same time.

Prabhu was fascinated by his experience but it wasn’t until he visited Nimbin, a centre for alternative culture and alternative modes of living, again in the late ‘80s, that his life began to change. A viable counter-culture and being part of it is now very much part of his life.

Khare’s first interaction with adivasis in Central India was different from Prabhu’s. He was struck by their ‘savage simplicity", he felt superior. He felt "hi-tech" solutions to their environmental problem were the way out. It was only when he was invited by the National Water Mission to visit the district of Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh that he got closer to the Bhil and Bhilala communities that lived there. He began to dig deeper into their religious rituals and culture, he began recording their creation myths which, incidentally, have a number of things in common with the creation myths of certain Australian aborigines. It was many years later that he began exploring Dang territory. Though Khare, like Prabhu, claims that his encounters with indigenous peoples and cultures have changed him, unlike Prabhu, he has no alternative community to live in.

The text that goes with the photographs of "Some Children of the Dream" claims that the success of Nimbin is largely due to the practical and hard-fought working out of ideas that originated in the ‘60s — hippy ideas which after their brief efflorescence, were mocked and ridiculed from the ‘70s onwards, both in Australia and in the Western countries where the ideas originated. Despite the ridicule, Nimbin, as both seed-bed and forest of alternative culture, has lasted 26 years and enters its 27th with greater hope, as the text puts it, is for "a new, hybrid, trans-national culture" that has global relevance".

"Some hope," said a cynic at the exhibition. But, as the text also says, isn’t this a time of "profound civilisational crisis"? Where most of the pretences of civilisation have ended, as in the current war in Europe, the caste and communal wars in South Asia and high-school massacres in the USA, perhaps what was once called "primitive" stands a chance.

Or will history always be a nightmare from which we’re trying to awake? Will we always be part of history’s horrible dream, a dream from which we can’t awake? Whatever some children of another dream say.

Associated News Features