Adventures of a Desi Knitter

Last week I went on my first trip to a couple of new archives in south India, in Chennai and Thanjavur to be precise, for my new research project. (More about both these places later, when I visit again). A friend who knows them well and had to do some work there too, came along, and I met some other friends and family too. Somehow, when punctuated by train travel, gin and tonics, old school meet-ups and incredible coffee, work becomes quite tolerable, no? Look at us, so busy with work, hotly discussing intricate details of micro-history, palm-leaf manuscripts and power relations in the countryside (no, really, we got a lot of work done):

I have always been a bit of an Indian Railways fanatic, and I will do a proper railways post later in the year, after I take a few more trips and better pictures. But after a very long time, I did something I used to love about train travel when I was in college - sitting in the open door of the speeding train with your face in the wind, watching the country go by. Our parents would be furious when we did this, and I don’t know if it’s my advanced age, or the increased speed of the trains nowadays, that this seemed a bit more dangerous now than back then. But swaying with the rhythm of the train and hearing the tracks bark at you as you is unbeatable. Back in the day with the steam engines, you could catch a piece of flying coal occasionally in your eye if you leaned out. Now it’s the acrid smell of diesel that you have to battle, but at the crack of dawn that day, the fresh river breeze easily subdued it. Being in an unreserved women’s compartment, with all the sociality that it entails, was even better.

The views of the sunrise, and the changing light, over the Kaveri river delta and its paddy fields were stunning as the train sped towards Thanjavur:

Speaking of coffee, there is very little in the world that provides as much joy and satisfaction as a good south Indian tumbler, hot and frothing.

I’m sharing it all with you, with some good news - I just heard, with official papers and all, that I now have tenure at my department. Big whoop of joy and all that, people!! This year has been hard in many ways, but this news brings me a lot of relief and excitement for the future. I do have to dust the seat of my pants and get cracking in the archives, but hey, I’m going to have some coffee and lie back and enjoy a break for just a little while longer. It’s great to be with my family to celebrate, but my first thought was to wonder what big knitting gift to get myself - I’m thinking a new umbrella swift, or better still, some semi-solid fingering Koigu for a sweater. I can’t do any of it until I return to Berkeley anyway and in the meantime I did get sloshed, but any suggestions?

Tags: Life, Travel, Students, Work, etc. by desiknitter
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Last week, a friend and I decided to escape the city and visit the Konkan, the coastal strip that stretches all the way from Bombay down to northern Kerala for a few days. One aim was to travel everywhere by the available public transport, so we picked a few small coastal villages and beaches within a few hours of Pune, and gave ourselves over to the red and yellow STs, the State Transport buses.

Well-heeled folks tend to shrink from horror at the STs, and there is undoubtedly much to sneer at - they can individually rattle each bone in your body, and the state of public facilities at the bus stations strains both the imagination and the bladder, particularly for women. The recently instituted, disastrous and utterly short-sighted, car-friendly policy of the Indian government has enabled more and more middle-class people to withdraw from such public spaces into their own cars, leaving them to the ever-surging numbers of poorer folks. Private Volvo buses nowadays compete with the STs, boasting better suspension and seats, if not superior driving skills. Both on popular highways and on small link roads, vans, 4×4s and the ambitiously named ’six-seater’s also eat into the STs’ revenues.

This harmless-looking six-seater is a marvelous python. It swells incredibly several times a day to swallow eight, ten, twelve, even fourteen people at once. It charges just a bit less than the STs, and its flexible metal body and equally flexible passengers allow its driver to pickle them in and make his ends meet. The buses thus find themselves in the unenviable position of having to ply loss-making public routes, with caps on fares further eroding their profits. Having grown up travelling in STs to go visit grandparents and other relatives, we were keen to take them once again on this trip. I don’t want to tell a trite (expat’s) tale about how this mode of travel allows one to see “the real India,” whatever the hell that is. But I have to say it was eye-opening to see how amazingly resilient and good-humoured these public services and their operators are in the face of remarkably trying work conditions, and how deeply and critically embedded they remain in daily life on and off the highways. If you have never ever been in a vehicle without a seat-belt the STs might not be for you, but hey, they also keep wonderful time. Only downside: too much rattling for any knitting.

Okay, enough pontificating. The Konkan is incredibly lush, especially in the monsoon when the whole landscape turns a fluorescent, shameless, almost golden green.

The Konkan is home to the magnicifient haapus or Alfonso mango, but it also has lots of other varieties of mango, jackfruit, arecanut, paddy, coconut palms, and lots and lots of chameleons, kingfishers, egrets, storks, kites and butterflies….
do click to make the thumbnails larger.

The region has a rich and diverse history, and is dotted with forts, temples and mosques, many of the religious structures newly refurbished by successive generations of locals who have migrated nationally and internationally for better prospects. The Shiva temple at Harihareshwar, with a rocky and surging seaface, is considered by many to be Dakshin Kashi, or the southern avatar of the holy city of Benares:

Some of the seafaces, like the one at Harihareswhar, are notoriously dangerous, but we were also lucky to find some quiet and unspoilt ones like those at Karde, Murud and Diveaagar, from where you can literally see the oncoming monsoon spells, thick shafts of grey from sky to sea along the horizon, heralding the lifeline of the subcontinent.

We walked for hours in the warm rain and swung across streams from long banyan ropes. By a happy coincidence, I happened to be reading Rathachakra, a famous Marathi novel set in the Konkan whose author, Shripad Narayan Pendse, was from Murdi, one of the very villages we visited. While Rathachakra is grim and often savagely critical of social life and human relationships, the landscape and our cavorting around also brought to mind other, prettier representations of idyllic rural life in this area as well - classic migrant narratives of the paradise left behind. All in all, it was all too real and fictional at the same time.

Tags: Travel by desiknitter
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(Thanks so much for the comments on the gunpowder, friends - in the next few months, rather than reply individually to comments, I’m going to respond here on the blog, so do check back in the comments; if you asked a question to the last one, the answer is here.)

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Bangalore to meet a few friends I hadn’t seen in some time. It was a whirlwind trip, but just what the doctor ordered for me. Gorgeous weather, good friends, yummy food, and a mad trip into the countryside to see some sights, singing old Hindi songs all the way. Really, what more does one need, ever? I took some photos of the new, shiny Bangalore, all glass and concrete malls and traffic like you wouldn’t *believe*, but that rant is for another day. This time, it didn’t dampen our spirits at all.

We took a trip in a large van to an old medieval temple dedicated to forms of the lord Vishnu at Somnathpura, built in the 13th century by the Hoysala kings of Karnataka.

Hoysala architecture is more famously represented at Halebidu and Belur, temples with stone carvings of an incredibly rich and detailed texture. Somnathpura is not quite as ornate, but it also doesn’t assault your senses and leave you gasping with the sheer intricate detail of the stonework at these two temples. It is quietly stunning, and is smaller and off the beaten track. Quite literally. Getting there from Bangalore is a challenge, with the ground sullenly arranging itself into a road at some points, and defiantly disintegrating into mud at others. But the quiet temple makes up for the bumpy journey, as does the gorgeous, gorgeous countryside dotted with palm trees and small ponds, especially in the monsoon. Having loony friends along for the ride smoothens it all out. The temple walls tell many stories, of battles, dynastic ambitions, the Dashavatara (Vishnu’s ten incarnations), and feature various gods and goddesses. In and around the temple complex, stone pillars seem to whirl endlessly in place, like potters’ wheels gone nuts.

The inscription at the temple detailing the land grants for its maintenance, in the beautiful Old Kannada script: (click all the small photos to enlarge them - it’s worth it)

It’s funny how you stumble upon an interesting question and then suddenly realise that it’s been buzzing around you for years without your being aware of it. I saw the goddess Lakshmi holding what looked like an ear of corn in her left hand, and was puzzled, because the temple is pre-Columbian, dating to the 13th century. After idle speculation about local grains like bajra and ragi, we left it at that. Googling and chatting with friends later revealed a whole controversy on this, as some scholars have held up these very sculptures as strong indicators of pre-Columbian migration of plants between the Americas and the old world, while others strongly dispute that it is corn/maize at all. Botanists, historians and anthropologists seem to be battling it out, as it has larger implications for our understanding of native American cultures and those of premodern Asia. I confess I don’t know much about the natural or cultural history of that period and have to read up more on the matter; Lakshmi too continues to stand uncaring and resplendent in stone. Any readers here know more about it?

The temple has other unusual representations, such as Narasimha (the half-lion, half-man avatar of Vishnu, fourth out of his ten incarnations) with his consort. Usually we see him emptying the demon Hiranyakashipu of his innards, but here on the photo above to the right he is calm and poised with Lakshmi on his lap.

I could stare at these friezes for ages. But we bundled into the van and headed to Ranganathittu, a nearby bird sanctuary. Lots and lots of storks, pelicans and cormorants in a lush, green park -

and plenty of ghariyals looking supremely bored and unconcerned with all the hoo-haa. We were in a boat much like the one you see in the background and despite the guide telling us they preferred fish to humans, we kept a safe distance from its gleaming teeth.

While we were in the boat, the clouds suddenly descended into a short and powerful rain shower that made everything an even lusher shade of green. You should have seen the looks on the faces of the other boat passengers as two of us burst into spontaneous song, even as we ducked under our dupattas - garjat barsat saawan aayo re… .

We came back to Bangalore tired and hoarse, but clean!

Tags: Travel by desiknitter
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Hey, all! Thanks so much for all your good wishes for my trip - here I am, on the other side of the world, recovered from jet lag already.

Plane travel is exhausting, disorienting, annoying and many other things. It also infantalises travellers like none other mode of travel. It’s not just the security staff who speak to you slowly but loudly as if you were either deaf or retarded, barking out orders in elaborate legalese-politese and processing you on a long and complicated assembly line from dangerous unknowns into government-deemed safe travellers. It is also the feeling of being strapped into the small, uncomfortable seat for so many long hours, with food brought to you every few hours. You sleep, you eat, some sort of entertainment hovers in front of your eyes to keep you diverted, and then you sleep and eat some more. This is how babies must feel - slightly out of focus and irritable and trapped. The flight attendants also treat you with a combination of firmness-laced-with-nice that parents whose patience is about to snap use on kids running wild. If the airlines provided diapers with the headphones and acrylic blanket wrapped in plastic, I imagine our regression to infanthood would be complete.

Speaking of actual babies travelling, there seemed to be many more than usual on this flight. Or maybe my claustrophobia was conjuring them up all around me. They wailed and howled throughout - sometimes in unison, sometimes in harmony, but always in dreadful cacophony. It occurred to me that anyone unsure about whether they want children would do well to travel on a transcontinental flight surrounded by infants and toddlers before they make a final decision. But I do feel bad for the parents, who always have this hunted, apologetic look about them. It must be awful to juggle discomfort and disorientation with a shrieking baby and dark looks from people all around you. I was virtuous, though - in keeping with the whole kids theme, I took refuge in The Sound of Music. (Btw, these are the Regia socks I began on another transcontinental flight in February - 64 stitches on size 0 needles, very plain and simple.)

That’s one point for Continental, I gotta say, even if they do, rather horrifyingly, charge for alcohol on international flights (WHY do American airlines do that?) - they have a whole set of very diverse films for you to choose from on your own little individual screen. Along with Julie Andrews, I also indulged in Jane Austen, with the wonderful, smart Emma Thompson adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, and the godawful Keira Knightley adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. If you permit me to rant about this for a second, I wonder what Austen herself would have made of some rather odd moments in this adaptation. I didn’t mind that it took liberties with the dialogue - the S&S adaptation did too, but the ones in P&P somehow didn’t work as well, mostly because they seemed to turn this elegant narrative of manners into a faux-historical teenage drama. “Don’t you dare judge me, Lizzy!” Charlotte Lucas says (after choosing calmly to marry that horrible Mr. Collins), and that wooden Darcy, who looks like a confused, drowned rat with that oddly dishevelled look, unpardonably blurts out “I love you” instead of the glorious “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you” to Elizabeth Bennet. She, in turn, yells “Leave me alone!” to her family, slamming the door and running upstairs. WTF?? Ah well. At least the von Trapps were as familiar and saccharine as ever.

It is hot here, and very erratic and strong thunderstorms are allowing the electricity department to cut power even more than usual. But it’s also cool and breezy and deliciously overcast in the evenings, and I started a longue duree lace project to keep me company on my equally long research project. It’s the Beginner Sampler stole from Victorian Lace Today, in Jade Sapphire Lacey Lamb, in tomato red, on size 3 needles. I am already loving it, but expect an FO only sometime around December, I think. My mum is convinced that my eyes are going to get worse from squinting at the tiny yarn and needles.

Oh, and I’m eating a lot of Alphonso mangoes. Mmmmmmm.

Tags: Shawls, Travel, Socks, Lace work by desiknitter
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Thanks, everyone, for the comments on the Ribby Cardi! I have been wearing it everywhere, even though it has been quite warm here during the day. The Eco+ is unfortunately already showing a tendency towards pilling with all this wear, and I hope that will not be a continued problem.

It will soon be too warm to wear all the wool sweaters, and I am packing them up. I took this picture for Swapna, who recently commented about imagining my cupboard full of handknits - they are not quite enough to fill a cupboard, but they are a decent pile and do nicely! I’m surprised that I don’t have more reds. Have to remedy that.

It is also that time of year again, when I go home to India and this blog features more food and travel than knitting. Except that this time, I am going not just for the summer but for a year’s research trip. I have waited six long years after graduating for some time off from teaching, and this is some hard-earned leave to do archival research for a second project. I am eager to get my hands dirty in the archives again and start working on relatively uncharted territory. For many reasons, it’s not the trip I had hoped for and looked forward to, and am anxious about how it will turn out. But one big plus, other than being able to spend so much time at length at home with my folks, is that the project will most likely take me to places I have never visited in the south and east of India. So I am excited!

All this is a preamble to saying that I will be blogging from India over the next year. Some of it will be about food, some about travel, random observations about lots of things, and some raving and ranting about work. Even though initially it will be too hot to knit, I will have lots of time and opportunity to keep the fingers flying, and so I am trying to estimate how much yarn I should take with me, which is easier said than done.

I plan to buy some acrylic yarns locally while I’m there, Swapna has most wonderfully arranged to get me some Pony rosewood needles, plus my mum already has all the notions I will need. But it’s not stopping me from trying to take my entire stash with me, and clothes and books and yarn and patterns are already overflowing out of my long-haul suitcase. Planning for that long a time away from my set up here is inducing tremendous anxiety as it is; tossing some knitting into it should be easy, but of course it’s not. Believe me, I am usually a light traveller and am taking this opportunity to freecyle and donate lots of things in the house, but am also suffering from an acute case of “but what if I need it?” syndrome, and an insane wish to pack books that have remained unread on my shelf for years. Also, all the patterns I want to knit right now seem to be, strangely enough, in thick, hardback pattern books.

So see you all soon on the other side of the world. But in the meantime, do tell: if you had to plan for a year away from your usual knitting routine, or even your usual non-knitting routine, what would you take and what would you leave behind?

Oh, and finally, did you see the cool “Ravel it” buttons on the left sidebar above each free pattern link? Ravelry offers a nice little html code to the pattern page and tells you the number of people making it - 118 people have made the Rangoli Hat! Okay, so it’s not Clapotis, but I had never imagined that so many people would knit it. It is most thrilling. I updated the pattern recently to correct some errors and suggestions people had pointed out, so if you downloaded it before May 22, do download the fresh 3.0 version.

Tags: Life, Travel, Students, Work, etc. by desiknitter
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This post is for my friend Aparna in Bangalore, who I thought of a lot on a last-minute trip to Los Angeles this weekend.

I went down for a special event and to hear a dear friend and colleague speak (some of you might recognize who all that hair in the foreground belongs to!).

But it was also a lazy day of walking on the beach as the afternoon cooled down, exchanging gossip with friends, eating wonderful food, and getting a bit dizzy and nauseated in the famed LA traffic.

Apoos, you were sorely missed!

(I got some knitting done, about which more later. For now, can you spot two recently finished projects in the pictures above?)

Tags: Travel by desiknitter
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I had a long and ponderous post about an exciting and exhausting week in Lisbon, full of Serious Observations. In many ways this was a difficult trip for me, with old bittersweet memories and new challenges. But I read it over and yawwwwwwwwn, people. Never mind all that. In keeping with the low-on-text and high-on-pixel approach of the last post, therefore, I’m attempting a simpler recipe.

Take some red roofs in bright sunlight:

Add some history (an old Moorish castle, a few medieval lanes, and the irony of capturing the monument to Portuguese global power at sunset):

Blend in a generous helping of old and new friends, fresh seafood and red wine, and the delicious melancholia of fado…

…and I do believe it will all taste very good indeed!

I did lots of knitting, and will show detailed progress (or more accurately, lack thereof) in a couple of days once I have some photos. Strong winds delayed my flight back by a day, about which I was really annoyed at first, but then thankful after seeing this video. So I have a ton of work to catch up on. But hey, in the meantime, here is a yarn store right in downtown Lisbon, in Baixa-Chiado. The euro prices for the mostly acrylic blends kept me from buying, but the colour selections were to die for.

Tags: Travel by desiknitter
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Some snapshots of the Thanksgiving dinner I had in San Diego. Nearly everyone was vegetarian, and even those that weren’t were ardent turkey-haters, or pumpkin-neutral. So the idea was to make it a healthy meal, which we did.

Some Potatoes au gratin absolutely dripping with cheese:

Baked zucchini, with lots of cheese to neutralize any benefits of the vegetable:

Black bean soup, where the celery by no means dominated:

More beans (yes, these were appallingly low fat, inspite of all the olive oil they were drenched in):

Pear Crisp with whipped cream:

and a Banana Cream Pie with more whipped cream:

But the most important servings were large dollops of giggles, reminiscences and the warmth of college and grad school friendships with two beloved old roommates:

And, finally, stiff cosmos, good cheer and the promise of many more such healthy gatherings in years to come:

Hope everyone celebrating had a happy thanksgiving weekend! Thank you all for the generous comments on my Ogee Tunic! I think I replied to everyone, but in case I missed anyone, thanks again. I got a lot of knitting done these past few days too, so stay tuned for some significant progress pictures on my WIPs…

Tags: Life, Food and Drink, Travel by desiknitter
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If you have even a passing acquaintance with South Asian history (and historians), you know that Calcutta, Bengal (and Bengalis) can be ignored only at your own peril. Capital of British India, hub of the Indian national movement, and now, nerve-centre of postcolonial navel gazing one of the major cities and regions that recent historiography on modern South Asia has examined exhaustively. Every semester, at least one student asks me - Hey Professor, why do we read so much Bengal stuff? Every semester, I come up with a bland answer instead of the one that I would really like to give. Of course, Bengal-bashing by those of us who work on other South Asian regions is as much fun as any other rehearsal of academic loyalties and pet peeves. Still, it is an idle question to ponder on an idle summer afternoon - not that I’ve been having many of those, mind - what would a modern South Asia syllabus without Bengal look like?

On a recent trip to Calcutta (or Kolkata as it’s now called), a visiting historian friend and I decided to abandon such subversive thoughts and instead plunge into the rich delights the city offers. It was a lot of fun to actually comb it with a colleague. Lots of old buildings, some majestic, others crumbling, dot central and north Calcutta. My father-in-law, who’s a regular local patriot and an inveterate urban hiker, will suddenly point out an (usually decrepit) old structure where Ronald Ross did malaria experiments, or William Makepeace Thackeray was born, or Subhash Bose or Rabindranath Tagore lived. This ‘Crumbling Calcutta’ image is, of course, a cliche, done to death in the popular international media, but the joys of suddenly physically coming upon places associated with past events and personalities that I read and teach and write about never fails to delight and surprise me every time I visit this city. Since my camera played truant this trip and a lot of my monument pictures didn’t come out well, above are a few snapshots. First is the massive marble paean to British imperialism from the early 20th century, Victoria Memorial.

We took a boat on the Hooghly (as the Ganga is known here), gazing at the many old British warehouses alongside the riverbank, recalling way too many details about East India Company trade and colonial policy regarding textiles and opium. (The red and yellow building in the third picture is a very typical Calcutta colonial structure).

Buildings aside, Calcutta, as has been argued recently, is also famously a site of informal sociality. Its ‘adda’s (friends getting together for long and wide-ranging chats about life, the universe and everything over chai) are legendary. Alas, once again due to my wretched camera, just a couple snapshots of the many different addas I spotted across the city (the bottom picture is of a famous tea-joint that is practically mobbed at teatime). They are almost certainly discussing the spectacularly bad display, yet again, by the Indian cricket team at Lord’s against England in the recently concluded test match. The guys in the second picture, on the other hand, are happier with their own carrom game, which they play on the roadside near my house with a makeshift bulb after dinner for a couple of hours.

Tags: Travel by desiknitter
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It is difficult to know exactly what to marvel at the most when visiting Ajanta and Ellora, two large, old, ambitious rock-cut cave temples / monasteries.

There are many such cave temple / monastery clusters across the Deccan plateau in India dating from roughly the 3rd-2nd centuries BC to the 7th-9th centuries AD. Some, like at Ajanta or Elephanta (near Bombay) are exclusively Buddhist or Hindu; others, like at Ellora or Badami, further south, have Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples in the same cluster. The carvings and representations of deities - Buddha, Shiva, Vishnu, Mahavira - in these clusters are superb windows into the way these faiths have co-evolved, commingled and debated over the centuries, in theology, mythology and in daily social and cultural practice.

The frescoes at Ajanta, although badly damaged over the centuries, have held their colours remarkably well, are the main attraction at Ajanta. But the stone sculptures at both places and the stunning, quiet landscape, not to mention just thinking of the monks and artisans who created these structures, took my breath away.

Tags: Travel by desiknitter
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