guestblog: India #1
Hello Readers! Thanks to my recent five-week stint in India, I told Anne that I’d fill in for her while she’s off gallivanting around the world. I was there teaching a course on color theory to traditional Indian embroiderers at the school Kala Raksha Vindyalaya (or KRV). I know it sounds suspicious that an American from the East Coast, where everyone wears black and brown and navy, could possibly know anything about color that an Indian doesn’t already know. I was skeptical of the same thing. India is the land of a million colors, right? In fact, my students fairly regularly pointed out that my clothes looked sad or like “food with no salt”- and that was while I was wearing pink jeans!
KRV is a phenomenal school in an extremely remote area of the state of Gujarat called Kutch, near Pakistan, where Westernization has barely made its influence known. Many of my students were actually semi-nomadic camel herders and lived a life similar to that of the generations before them for hundreds of years. KRV offers education to men and women of all ages- most of whom have had very little to no schooling at all- and encourages them to sustain their traditions by helping them create profit from it. If any of you readers have a chance to visit that region of India, I’d recommend stopping by the school or its museum; the friendliness of the students and employees have made that place one that will forever be close to my heart. –Sarah
{campus shrine and students by Sarah Templin}
volksfaden
May 20, 2008 at 3:36 pm //
What an interesting post! Look forward to reading everything you write about India this week!
Linda