Documenting and decoding the mundane: Martha Díaz-Adam research on rajasthani turban traditions
Martha Díaz-Adam, Rajasthan 2018.
Martha Díaz-Adam is a visual artist-anthropologist and documentary photographer. Of Lebanese descent, she was born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She studied Fine Arts, Cultural Anthropology and Art History at the Utah State University.
Díaz-Adam's work is multifaceted. She has conducted research, presented in photo conferences, and exhibited nationally and internationally, across North and South America, the Caribbean, and Southern Asia. Over the years, Martha has developed a body of work that shifts between documentary-style portraits and fine art photography. In her artist statement, she explains that her work aims to “educate the viewer about cross-cultural understanding through on cultural heritage, traditional livelihoods, preservation of cultures, religious devotional practices, internal & external migration patterns and the empowerment of oppressed ethnic groups”.
We sat down with Martha for a small interview regarding her more recent visual-research on the use of turbans in rural Rajasthan. Although this work remains unpublished, she indulged us with this preliminary discussion about it, and was kind enough to curate some of the images for this blog entry.
It’s a study on the Rajasthani Turban, which is a crafted piece of culture belonging to Rajasthani people everyday life. The turban called my attention, as the Visual-Artist-Anthropologist that I am, for every fold, every color, every texture or pattern has a meaning. During my time as an Artist in residency in Rajasthan, I conducted participant observation research and visual documentation regarding the present stories and the preservation of the turban from the perspective of the locals. While on the field at the Andore Village and its surroundings, I interviewed and photographed locals every day in order to have a deeper understanding of the turban tradition in rural India. In the region, there is an extensive variety of turbans worn by the Rajasthani males and, mostly, the older men of the villages. This practice is not religiously tied. Its color and style vary according to the village, caste, sub-region or headquarter, occupation and age. It is maintained by the elders in the villages, passed on to future generations, and it’s rarely preserved by the younger generation or inhabitants in the urban areas or cities, who see it as an outdated tradition, except for when it comes to calling the attention of tourists.
Creating a visual research about The Cultural Preservation of the Rajasthani Turban was my main task during my days living in Andore, but it was not just about that. In the State usually described as the Land of the Rajputs, I found myself in a place where the textiles and the block printing practice are used as a tool of social identification, stratification, ornamentation,and a symbol of empowerment. Where color is found anywhere despite the desertic sceneries. Where sounds of chaos and music composed the days. Where the essence of devotion is not an exclusive act to religious beliefs but used to express connection to everything that composes everyday life.
The turban is a crafted piece of clothing folded with the richness of history and heritage. A symbol of an everyday culture, that radiates pride and empowerment. These feelings are not exclusive to the males who wear it; in general, they belong to the people of Rajasthan. Its preservation is indeed a must, because of how it highlights, among the other Indian sub-cultures, its uniqueness in the world and its diversity of styles within the region. The turban is more than a beautiful piece of clothing, it is who people are and what they do every day. It is present in the field, in their home, in their temples, in their celebrations, in their grief, in their most common and special occasions, as in their history, their present and their future. Still today, they continue to speak to their children and grandsons about it, hoping to pass down this colorful tradition.
Days after I lost a non-refundable flight to the other side of the world, getting a new one and hoping that everyone who told me “you don’t know where you are going” was wrong, on October 20th, 2018, I arrived in India. In the previous months, I had repetitive conversations with a lot of my relatives questioning the decision of accepting my attendance as an Artist in Residency on a farm in the Village of Andore. The scenario of a woman immersing herself in a journey of a couple of months in a foreign land, alone, is something that generated a lot of questions about safety. In this case, it was a question raised in my homeland, Dominican Republic, as it was during my days in India.
The truth is, I did know where I was going thanks to the pre-research that one, who is involved in fieldwork, does. But what I never expected is how complex it would be. Indian culture is often reduced to divinity, devotion, and deities. Although, admittedly, it would be hard to explain it without those three words, it is not enough to rely upon those concepts.
In a land where there is so much relation to the divine, it is very rare not to use your devotion as a verb belonging to your everyday life. Although the concept of being devoted is commonly related to a religious practice, while deconstructing my observation of the culture I found how it’s a full-time practice of the villager's routine. It is present in almost everything they do, as if it were a justification for their existence as human beings. Humans who celebrate or devote themselves to the process of what’s seen as ‘mundane’, the everyday life.
Prior to my arrival, the art residency received and accepted my proposal on creating a visual research that delved into the possible social issues on how the iconic culture of the Rajasthani Turban is being culturally preserved or not. How does the community see it? What were the tensions involved in its practice? And how has a past tradition evolved into the present times? Those were some of the questions I initially formulated. Facing its complexity, it was impossible to lay my eyes on one specific aspect of Rajasthani culture. Understanding the Rajasthani turban, perhaps the most evident and main symbol of their identity, required me to take a wider look at what was happening in everyday life in rural Rajasthan. I had to deconstruct what my eyes were looking at in order for me to construct an understanding of it.
Adapting to the local routine on the farm, visiting the locals’ houses (being welcome with dum wali chai before I even said Ram Ram), studios, places of work, places of worship, places of entertainment, and anything/everything (like delicious vegetarian local meals that you could never say no to, not even if you were full) that involve a day-to-day routine for the villagers of Andore is where I centered my creative process.
As the days passed, I started creating small photographic and textiles designs typologies records, as a visual method to illustrate and document what I was experiencing while interacting with their culture. It was this process that served me as a tool to visualize the complex and beautiful intensity that is lived in rural Rajasthan, as it exists in other parts of India where there is a vast diversity of other subcultures. Typology has the ability to reshape perceptions, I used it to create a connection between objects that show no visual relationship, while also highlighting differences that could be used as a comparison to other subcultures.
