The
Phantom Lady Strikes Again
For
this issue, the Phantom Lady invites her friend, the cultural theorist-
curator-art critic N. Rajyalakshmi to interview Archana Hande about her
thrilling bicycling tour of Switzerland.
LADY ON A BICYCLE
NR Ms. Archana, I am very curious to hear
about your cycling project in Switzerland. Did you know that learning bicycling
was an important part of the women’s reform movement in India? It meant
modernity and freedom, and even now we can see that a woman on a vehicle is the
butt of jeers and jokes, if not outright attack. A friend was telling me that his grandmother
created a sensation in Pune as a young widow, learning bicycling from her
teenage son. And there is that hilarious scene in Arun Khopkar’s film Katha Don Ganpatraonchi about the two
feuding Ganpat Raos, when the mother arrives on a visit in her nine-yard sari,
cycling to military music and doing ferocious lathi exercises at every stop.
AH (Laughs)
In Switzerland I was a great curiosity and known as the “the Indian lady on a
bicycle”. The Swiss are used to seeing Indian tourists who love luxury and will
not walk a step. On top of Mount Titlies in Engelberg where a song was
picturized for the film Dilwale Dulhaniya
Le Jayenge, there is a big cut out of Shah Rukh and Kajol as Raj and
Simran, which is a favourite place for Indians to take photographs. At the base
of the mountain you will find a desi hawker’s cart with vada pav, pav bhaji,
idli and chai where Indian tourists crowd to devour the food. While eating,
they make enquiries like, whether it will be cold and snowy up at 3,238 metres?
They are usually dressed in thin Tshirts or sarees and Hawaii chappals. By the
time they finish, the ticket counters are closed so they have to come back the
next morning!
NR (Laughs) What was your project about?
AH I
applied for a residency to Pro- Helvetia and my proposal was that I wanted to
become a landscape painter. I was in art school in Santiniketan where we are
taught to be landscape painters – we used to cycle around the countryside with
our sketch books every afternoon and the seniors used to train us: senior boys
training junior girls. And it had to be in a particular style. So in
Switzerland I thought I’d cycle around being a landscape painter, or playing a
location hunter for Bollywood films. A cycle has more convenient access to
places: you can carry it, go along paths and stop anywhere you like.
The idea was to bring back the Swiss
landscape to India. It’s like a migration of landscape: first, when the trouble
started in Kashmir, Switzerland became “Kashmir” in Bollywood films, later
Switzerland became “Switzerland”, and then Switzerland came to India. I’ve seen
painted Swiss landscape sets in the Ramoji Rao Studios in Hyderabad. At one
point the Himachal and Ladakh areas which had less conflict became
“Switzerland”. It was all about the exoticness of snow.
NR I saw a Hindi film, I think it was Hum, in which the Ooty scenes were shot
in Mauritius. The scenery did not look like a hill station at all - it looked
tropical!
AH Before
going there, I thought it would be very simple- I’d take a tent and a bike and
stop whenever I was tired- and I’d do watercolours whenever I felt like.
Then I realized that you can’t do that
because there are a lot of restrictions on camping: you can’t really camp
anywhere, there are special camping areas, so you have to find places to stay.
I would have to carry food for the whole day. I was told that people in the
interiors may not speak English and that Switzerland was divided into cantons,
and that a lot of the cantons may have a problem with race, so they might not
be helpful at all. The Swiss people I was corresponding with thought that
Switzerland was not friendly- they were scared that if I was tired and knocked at
someone’s door to stay the night I may not be entertained, and they were
nervous that I was a woman and an Indian woman, and that I couldn’t afford to
stay in Bed and Breakfasts because it would have cost me a lot of money. They
completely ruled out my idea of spending the night in village homes, because
they said I could meet a psychopath, for instance.
NR This sounds like a great adventure, and
you did it alone. It must have taken a lot of planning?
AH It
took three months of planning - I bought an 18-gear bike in India and did some
trial runs in Bangalore and Mumbai, from Kandivli where I live in Mumbai, to
Alibaug which is 75 kms away and back, for example. I had to check the timing
and whether I could maintain the energy; on the second day the body gets tired,
and then you pick up the energy again. In Bangalore I would cycle from my
parents’ home to far off parts of the city every day so that my body was not so
unprepared.
NR How did you work it out? You had never
been to Switzerland before.
AH I
met several people by chance, and through friends, who helped me. Surekha told
me about Lilian Hasler, a Swiss sculptor who lived in Pune. When I met her and
told her about my project, she laughed. She said an Indian doing anything
physical was the most hilarious thing! Then Lilian said she would help me and
took out a cycling map of Switzerland. She showed me all the low and high
areas, and advised me to try and follow the rivers and the lakes because if
there was a water body, it meant it was a low lying area. She asked me to
figure out the entire route and fix it before I left. She said don’t knock on
strange doors, but organize a set of friends from here.
Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy’s friend was a
sportsman called Balz Laimberger from Aarau. He’s a cyclist and a sailor. He
told me to come with a plan, he’s part of a cycling group and they have a
directory with the phone numbers and addresses of about five hundred people
from all over Switzerland who are cyclists. So a cyclist can call up a member
and ask to stay for one night- but you have to be a member. Since Balz was one,
he said that any time I got stuck in a place I could call him and fix up my
stay, but I could call only a day earlier.
He helped me with the route suggesting short cuts, more scenic views and
mountains to avoid, fleshing out the map that Lilian and I had planned.
Bernard Imhasly, the Swiss brother-in-law
of my gallerist Shireen Gandhy and his daughter Anisha who lives in Bern,
helped out and later Pro-Helvetia gave me an assistant, Lena Eriksson who
started connecting with all these people. She made a list of what I would need
for the trip and warned me about sudden rains.
NR And what happened in Switzerland? Did
everything go according to plan?
AH In
the first ten days I thought I would travel by train and get used to the
country. Art Basel was going on and I
met a lot of Indian artist friends there and spent time with them seeing all
the museums, but it was raining throughout! I fixed my trip to start on 20th
June but the rain wouldn’t stop. I was nervous because I wouldn’t be able to
cycle properly or do watercolours and I had to reach my host by 7pm. everyday.
In Basel, people told me about Jean-
Frederic Schnyder, a Swiss artist who’s a big star: he’s a landscape painter
who cycles and paints. He has several
series of works- sometimes he only cycles up to highways and paints them,
sometimes it’s just mountains. He’s older now but he did this till his forties
and became famous for it. I was very excited about this but everyone told me
that it was very difficult to get in touch with him. He lives in Zug. I
realized I could go to his place on my bicycle tour, but that would come at the
end as it was near Zurich.
Luckily, the rain stopped on the first day
and it was sunny for the rest of my trip. I planned my journey anti- clockwise
from Zurich. I had wanted to do it clockwise like the pradakshina, but the route was very mountainous, so it was easier
to go anti-clockwise and do the plains first. Someone told me this had been
Napoleon’s route when he attacked Switzerland! I thought I could meet Jean-
Frederic in Zug at the end and show him all my watercolours. I would call my
trip “ Meeting Jean- Frederic Schnyder” and build up a story around it, about
being on my way to meet him.
NR I googled Schnyder and an article says he
paints certain banal things over and over again, like series of train stations,
and called him an artist- archivist. That’s interesting because you work with
the idea of the archive yourself, and this is close to your project.
AH Everyone
told me that it was impossible to meet Jean-Frederic unless I went through his
gallery, that he rarely appears in public. He didn’t even have an email id or a
cell number, just a landline. Till the day I left Basel, I couldn’t get through
to him. So the plan to meet him in Zug was unpredictable.
I stayed at Lilian’s flat in the first
month in Zurich. When I reached Zurich, Lilian arrived from Pune and she gave
me her 7- gear bicycle to use on my trip. Lilian was still doubtful about me.
On the first day she showed me around Zurich, and on the second day she gave me
the keys of her bike and the address of her studio and said she was having a
barbecue there and I should be there at 6 pm sharp. I googled and found a
detailed cycle map. I didn’t realize this was a test! The studio was in the
countryside 30 kms. away but I managed to cycle there on time. She was pleased
and gave me the green signal.
Between Lena, Lilian and Balz, they gave me
everything I needed. I didn’t have to buy any equipment, except my clothes. At
my first stop in Aarau my host Balz and his friend Jürg Fritzsche laughed at me
when they saw my 7- gear bike and Jürg gave me his new 24- gear light mountain
bike to use. I was embarrassed because the bike was really expensive, but Balz
told me in an aside that Jürg was very rich and he could afford it!
I had to learn how to repair a puncture,
and in Switzerland, even parking a bike is a skill because you have to lift it
up high and hang it up by a hook on a pole in the parking areas.
NR And what happened on the actual journey?
AH Swiss
people exercise the whole day! They spend their lunch breaks having a quick
sandwich and jogging the rest of the time. In fact I hardly saw any place that
was lonely because there were people cycling or jogging in the deepest forests.
Sometimes I felt silly to be doing this project which was so normal for them.
My experience was the opposite of what we
had imagined. In one of the most conservative cantons in Giswil (which I was
warned could be racist), where I had no host to stay with, the Hotel Krone gave
me a free room. The owner said an Indian woman cycling was a rare thing and
should be encouraged! Sometimes when I got lost and knocked at some door,
people would give me food and drink and cycle along with me till I found my
route. I experienced no racism, and because of other cyclists encouraging me on
the road, I finished my trip, otherwise I could have got tired and got on to a
train at any time, since I had a free train pass.
The host in every town cooked a fantastic
dinner for me and showed me around the city. They would make breakfast for me
the next day and pack lunch for the journey. So I saw the events and museums
everywhere. One of the interesting things I saw was the Obwald music festival
held in the deep woods near Giswil. This happens once every year, when there is
yodelling through the night. Groups from different cantons perform different
types of yodelling. It was a full moon night and Bernard and Anisha had booked a
table there. A guest country is invited each year and it was Mali this time.
All night, there were group performances by Swiss yodellers, very formal,
alternating with wild Mali dancing, with Mali and Swiss food being served. It
was a fantastic experience.
When I reached Burgdorf I saw a huge poster
of Subodh Gupta’s show, and
in Thun I ran into Bharti Kher’s show. The
museum people in Thun said I could park my bike with all my luggage right
inside the building at the reception- it was so funny, like taking Subodh’s
work to see Bharti’s show!
NR Ms. Archana, all this is seems so
strenuous! Did you manage to do any watercolours at all?
AH The
water colour painting project was very difficult, because I hadn’t calculated
that I would need to calm down for some time after the cycling, or that
sometimes the landscape would not change for a long time. But I would blog
every evening. My bicycle tour is part of an ongoing work called Archana Devi Travels.
Sometimes I would end up taking the wrong
route. I once took the hiker’s route instead of the cycling path and I had to
carry my bike with the luggage up a steep path beside a waterfall, for two or
three hours. A car hit me once, and I had several falls, but nothing serious,
just got a few bruises.
NR And did you meet Jean-Frederic Schnyder?
AH The
night before I was leaving for Zug, when I still had no clue about how to
contact Jean- Frederic, my host, a curator who knew his gallerist, managed to
get his number. I called him and he was so welcoming, inviting me to come at
any time! When I reached there he spent four hours with me seeing my
watercolours and bringing out his old paintings, to compare our versions of the
same landscapes. He knows every mountain in Switzerland. When I asked him about
his reputation as a difficult recluse, he laughed and said that was only for
commercial people like curators and gallerists, for artists he was always
available. He insisted that I stay with them another day, but when I said I had
to leave for Zurich, he gave me all his catalogues and even packed my bike for
me expertly. So I did finally meet the mythical Jean-Frederic Schnyder!
Starting
21 June to 1 July 2010
Route:
Zurich – Aarau – Burgdorf – Bern – Thun – Bonigen, near Interlaken – Mariengen
– Giswil via Brünig Pass – Sarnen – Engelberg - Emmenbrucke - Zug - Zurich
http://archanadevitravels.blogspot.com
( N.
Rajyalakshmi began her career as a journalist in the Ideal Times, Bangalore,
where she had a regular culture column. She is now widely respected
internationally as a leading intellectual in the cultural field, celebrated
particularly for her interviews with the artist Pushpamala N.)
Pictures courtesy: Archana Hande
