Finding Narratives at K.R.Market
What is information? What are stories? Are there story-like connections or narratives within the facts? If so, what narratives hide within seemingly-dull details, and in how many ways can we explore them?
The five-week unit that I facilitated in July and August 2019 was called Information and Storytelling. It encouraged thirteen second year Bachelor of Design students to map hidden tales and bring forth narratives from “wellsprings of fact” … The wellsprings or ‘studio’ they dipped into was the vibrant, bustling space of the Krishnarajendra Market or K.R Market in Chickpete, east Bengaluru.
I had moved to Bengaluru just two months before this teaching cycle began. One of the teacher orientation exposures that I had opted for was a walk through the old city, beginning with a look at the Art in Transit intervention at Chickpete station. I was fascinated by the story of the annual Karaga festival, represented through wall murals just within the building. I was especially transfixed by the sight of utilitarian cartons propped against the outer wall of Chickpete station, that had a brown-haired girl showing a side profile, taking in the smell of jasmine flowers. The metro had brought me here from faraway north Bengaluru, and I felt that, like the brown-haired girl, I could connect to this ancient flower and fruit market, fuelled daily by the skill and labour of common people. It was as if I too, the outsider, even centuries later, could dip into the essence of ephemeral jasmine. I decided to introduce my students to this space and hoped that they would be inspired by it.
The idea, I found out a few weeks later when term began, worked for them somewhat the way it worked for me: because most of them had recently moved to Bengaluru. So they too struggled with and eventually found prompts for their narratives — triggers that were irregular, intuitive and personal in nature. K.R Market, as I’d suspected, has history, commerce, faith and belief systems (the Goddess myths as well as a secular fabric), and contemporary issues (like commerce, hunger, substance abuse, missing children and garbage disposal) enough to intrigue curious young artists!
Between week one and five of the cycle, students paid several visits to the market. They expressed their findings through fiction and non-fiction narratives which they drafted and re-drafted. They created a portrait of a person/ group of people in K.R. Market, through stories, a play, experiential narrative, person profiles, articles, illustrations and comics. They also produced a piece of fiction or nonfiction writing, a photo essay, illustrations, a comic and board game, based on the settings or processes of K.R.Market.
In order to create the work mentioned above, I felt that students (many of whom come from urban, middle-class homes) must learn how to look at and be curious about information that is alien to their daily lives. So, through the first week, students understood how to take a closer look at information. They then learnt how to frame pertinent questions, take an interview, add secondary research and write out people profiles. Being able to comfortably interview the denizens of K.R Market, I felt, was key to “accessing” its core narratives. The space of the market being crucial, the students mapped the history and culture of Bengaluru and saw how Chickpete and K.R. Market are positioned here, through their own research as well as through sessions with Suresh Jayaram, old city consultant with Art in Transit, artist and curator of One Shanti Road, and Art in Transit Project Staff, Shreeparna Mitra.
The crowded spaces and heaped garbage, sheer numbers of people and animals, colours and smells, confused these 19-year-olds, most of them only a year old in Bengaluru. They were initially quite intimidated by the idea of having to speak with the sellers at the market, Kannada being an alien language for most. But they set bravely out and dived right in. They asked questions, were frightened away by the market’s murkier folk, staked out friendly ones, gathered impressions and information and created a myriad narratives from these.
By merging information and techniques of storytelling, characters, plots and situations — shaded with beauty, irony, humour and paradox — were brought to life in a range of context-sensitive mediums. Our broader artistic intent was to understand that the way we perceive the world changes with how we see a story and what we choose to narrate of it.
Here is what a student, Tvishaa Shah, wrote about the experience:
Tvishaa Shah produced two pieces of work — an illustrated story for children and a game. The story was based around the dreams of a widowed, impoverished flower seller. She wishes to travel to all the places that her flowers come from. She imagines these fields of flowers under the open sky, visited by birds and rivers, in vivid detail. But she must stay and sell her flowers day after day at K.R Market in order to put her three little children through school. They arrive at the end of their school day to hug her and to help her pack up her wares.
Along with three other students, Devansh Pawan, Maaham Ali Rizvi and Samyukhtha Sunil, Tvishaa designed a board game called Rush Hour. It is set in the space of KR market and explores the processes and the practices that occur in the market on an everyday basis. They identified the kind of stores on every floor of the market and created a board that roughly replicated the market complex. Taking the order-within-chaos of the market as an integral aspect of their game, they added some interesting elements in the game (player profiles, rush hour stops, action cards, etc). This gives the players an actual feel of the market and allows them to experience the dynamism of this space.
While for most, being at the market was a warm experience, for a few, like Shanelle Barboza, it was difficult and sometimes painful.
Tuning into this sense of discomfort, Shanelle made a series of illustrations of a garland of exotic flowers that makes its way into and around the market, sometimes in a basket, at other times dragged at someone’s heel. It ends up on one of the many piles of garbage. Its journey through the murkier aspects of K.R. Market is an unusual exploration.
Mahimna Joshi was interested in the lives of the labourers who carry gunny bags of flowers from the trucks and into the market. Boarding an airport bus at 2 am, Mahimna made his way to K.R Market, to watch how the day begins in this singular place. His account of it is an experiential narrative written in detail. Here is an extract from The Tale of Jute Bag Carriers:
Mahimna is reworking this experiential telling into a journalistic piece about migrants from rural India, since many of the labourers he went on to interview are from villages in Purnia district in Bihar.
Shreya Khadilkar crafted fiction narratives from the history of the space that present day K.R.Market occupies, and the “Amman” or Goddess myths that sellers and local residents still tell. She made one up on her own. An extract from a seven-chapter story she wrote:
And then this particular work, Bhavani Nadgonde’s tentative and poignant exploration of the spaces and people of K.R flower market, leaves me with the hope that place-based explorations like this one could spark continuing artistic reflection. The work seems to stem from Bhavani’s intuitive understanding of the humanity of K.R Market. She connected deeply with its people, spaces, history and myths, and through this artistic documentation, found herself a role here.
I like to think that students were changed a little at least by the experiences they had at K.R.Market. At the last session of the unit, where we talked about personal learnings, Medha Agarwal, who is part Kannadiga, said she had understood the value of knowing how to speak a language in order to access a culture. She is happy that her grandmother speaks with her in Kannada and is hoping to get better at it herself. Girls from Bandra in Mumbai talked about going back and exploring their vibrant local markets as sources of narrative. They all spoke of the surprising generosity of the sellers… the sharing of food from their tiffin boxes, the many cups of chai, and the meandering, often revelatory, conversations.
