Block Carving in Northern India
- stemeillon
- Dec 13, 2024
- 11 min read
Updated: Mar 14
I've decided to split up my posts about India into a few bits because there's a lot on my mind. This one is about the whole reason I came here in the first place. The next will be about why it was so incredibly challenging for me, so stay tuned or something.
I arrived for two weeks with the goal of learning traditional block carving from a man that I heard about from a French couple in Mongolia. Very random! I knew I had to be in Nepal starting December 12th, so I figured I could squeeze Jaipur in between Cambodia with my family and the start of my solar-energy training in Nepal. Previously I had no plans to go to India during this trip, maybe in part because I’m solo and it's known to be tricky for women, but also because I think my interests were elsewhere.
The prior knowledge I had about India was from a few friends back home and in Sydney, but I was pretty clueless overall. Flying into Jaipur International Airport, I figured I would be able to buy a SIM card and find an ATM at the airport. I also didn’t eat on the plane because I had to pay for the meal and figured I would have cheap options on arrival. I was dead wrong; the airport was four walls with a security and immigrations checkpoint. No public Wi-Fi unless you had an Indian SIM, but nowhere to buy a SIM card on site. No ATMs so no cash to pay for a taxi, but no Wifi to connect to Uber (a main rideshare app in India as well). I hadn’t eaten in over 12 hours and was SO hangry and there was nowhere to even buy a snack in the airport. It felt like they didn’t want tourists there.
Finally a woman begrudgingly let me join her hotspot to call an Uber, which took 40 minutes to sort out, and then a 30 minute ride later my driver tried to drop me down the street from my hostel, which was in a dark alley, in a neighborhood where there was literally not a soul in the street. I insisted he turn around and drive me into the alley to drop me in front of the door because I felt SO uncomfortable. He complied and I went into the hostel, checked in, and they kindly gave me a private room for the night because a man was snoring insufferably loud in my dorm room. For dinner I ate a bag of almonds from the bottom of my backpack that expired in March of 2023, then I took a shower, bought a eSIM through an app called Yo, shed a tired tear, and passed out.
The next morning I was supposed to go start with the block carver (Veer) but I told him I needed some time to figure things out, eventually postponing till the next day because I felt so depleted. I met a nice Belgian girl in my hostel and she showed me a lovely rooftop café called 3Brothers, which had opened the night before and to access it you had to go up unmarked flights of unlit stairs from a random door in the middle of the market—super random. But instantly it felt like a safe haven, a bit above the insane traffic and good Chai and a delightful sandwich brought me back to life. We then went to the Amber Fort, a famous fort on the hill near Jaipur, and walked around to explore.
I asked a local “if an Indian person says to show up after 9:00, does that mean at 9:00, 9:30, or 10:00? What’s polite here?” and they said I should go at 10:30. I took a 30 minute rickshaw (during which time a moto bonked into my tuktuk but only once) for 160 rupees, or $1.75, and arrived at 10:00, thinking “I’m early” but I think in the end Veer was annoyed that I came so late, but no worries. I gave him a box of cookies and he offered me some chai and explained the beginning of the process. I was to draw anything I wanted, something simple, and then we would transfer it onto the block. I did a first design and he said it was too hard, so I drew something else. He showed me how to transfer the design to a block of wood and it took me forever since it was my first time.
His work is INCREDIBLE. Veer has been doing block carving, as he learned from his father, for 15 years (he is in his early 30s now). Everything is done by hand, and he estimates he has made thousands of blocks. I got a glimpse at some of them when I went to his workshop and WOW WOW WOW. You can see at @srishtihandicraft on Instagram. He carves the blocks and his brother owns a printing company nearby where they use the blocks as stamps for textile printing.
He offered me lunch and I timidly accepted, not knowing much about the culture here, but I was super hungry because I hadn’t eaten breakfast. He came back with a bag of apples and guavas, so I ate them and they were nice and I resigned myself to eat something more when I went back later that afternoon. I started carving that day but got nowhere near finishing, it is a very slow process. You use a wooden mallet of sorts (looks like a table leg) to hammer a little chisel as precisely as possible and slowly chip away at the wood. I left around 2:00 or 3:00 I think.
The second day I came exactly at 9:00, feeling guilty about the day before, but then he didn’t show up until 9:30 so I guess I learned that about a half hour late is better. I got to work and he once again asked me if I wanted lunch, but this time I asked if there was somewhere I could go get some food? He said no no it’s okay I’ll bring for you, and I figured he understood, but he came back with a bag of bananas. So I ate 7 bananas for lunch.
It was nice though, a guy walks around in the street with a thermos of chai and a bag of cups and offers chai every hour or so, so every day I had wonderful chai while I worked. I think they pay him at the end of the week or something. I finished carving my design but it needed a lot of cleaning up, which I left for the next day. I took a tuktuk back and wow it was so overwhelming; I think the block carving is so meditative that to step out into crazy Indian traffic is more harsh and jolting than it usually is.
Speaking of traffic: I'll describe it a bit here. To me it felt like they drive more with their ears than their eyes: the honking is sometimes absurd and it sounded like screaming. One time a guy's honker was broken so he literally screamed at me instead it was quite startling. They are the drivers with the most and least awareness that I've ever been around. They never check over their shoulder before pulling onto a street, they never check their mirrors and often don't even have them, and while crashes are common I saw remarkably few. They drive on the left side here (residual from British colonization) but it's normal to see people driving on the wrong side of the road because they can't be bothered to turn and cross traffic later on. Also, traffic adapts as it needs to avoid crashes, they have quick reflexes. When you cross the street you wait for an open-ish moment and start walking and people just swerve around you, it's terrifying, but it helps to have confidence. I thought it was hilarious that they bothered painting lanes because it wasn't even a suggestion, just a bit of art on the road. It's also common for people to push start a motorbike, and if a rickshaw or car gets stuck in the road people will help push it on its way. The noise is unrelenting and exhausting and kinda freaky sometimes. And there is SO much pollution, sometimes riding in a rickshaw you feel like your head is in a tail pipe. The local buses are nice though and you don't notice the traffic as much, especially with some headphones. They don't stop though. You just have to hop on and off when they slow down, it's intimidating. The first time I took one was on a Sunday and there was no one in there so I thought wow awesome! but the next day it was crammed full and there were even two mothers and four children jammed into one two-person seat.
The third day I came around 9:30-10:00 and as I started carving, the guys that worked for Veer (they were so sweet, I think pretty young maybe late teens and very talented as well) brought me some samosas. It was so kind of them. I also realized at this point that there was a samosa stand right across the street (ish) and kicked myself for not seeing it sooner. We ate floor samosas and then kept on working. When I finished cleaning up my block he made my first print by applying ink with a little puffy bag (hard to describe, ref. the photos) and pressing a piece of paper to it. I was thrilled to see it come to fruition. He then took me to his brother’s printing company, a ten minute motorbike ride away, and gave me a tour and let me print my design on a piece of cotton. I met some of the factory workers, two of which were deaf brothers who, as Veer’s brother Bhupendra said, were very lucky to find this job because it doesn’t require hearing. We went back and I said I wanted to keep learning, so I drew another design. I was tired and very hungry though, so I left and called it a day.
The fourth day I arrived in the afternoon because I was meant to go to Veer’s house for dinner. It felt great to sleep in and take my time getting ready since I was getting lots of poor quality sleep there. They all thought my block looked like a pineapple (it was a cactus but it did in fact look like a pineapple). The goal with this block was to learn how to print a design that required multiple colors. You have to create an outline block for the darker color and then make smaller blocks to fill in the other colors. In my case, black for the outline, green for the cactus body, and red for the flower. Dinner with Veer’s family was lovely and they were all really curious to ask me questions, especially his nephews who are engineers my age. Everyone was so friendly and the food was delicious, although it was a very new experience for me to eat alone while they all watched and chatted with me. They ate much later, around 9:30 or 10:00, once I was gone. They live in a quiet secluded neighborhood and his nephew was kind to drive me 15 minutes back to the main road and help me find a rickshaw, especially because he had a nightshift coming up for his company.
On the fifth day I came around 10:00. There was a woman who came to my hostel with the goal of learning block carving, so I’d given her Veer’s contact and when I arrived that morning she was already there, working on a drawing. It was cool to see that it worked out for her to come! It was also nice to see another woman, because it really had been a while. I finished working on my design from the day before and eventually we went and practiced printing, me with my cactus pineapple and her with the really cool grasshopper she’d made. It was pretty late by the end of the day, and I was SSOOO hungry so I went home and made some instant noodles for $0.30. Also she told me about a local bus that ran pretty much directly from the hostel to the printing place in Sanganer for only $0.25 and I kicked myself for not realizing that sooner, especially because haggling is so frickin exhausting for me and the bus sounded really nice, especially because you don’t notice terrible traffic as much when you're on a bus.
Thus the sixth day I went by bus—so blissful compared to the rickshaw. I started on another block, a hummingbird with a Buddhist infinity knot in the middle, and Veer said he wouldn’t be there till later that morning as he was caught up in something at home. I’d forgotten it was Sunday, and he usually plays cricket with friends in the neighborhood. I finished my design a few hours later, already noticing how much faster everything was going with more practice. I did mess up a bit, but it wasn’t so bad. Although at the end when I was trimming off the excess wood I chopped the nose in half and had to glue it back on whoops. But this wood is the softer of the two he works with (he said something about Teak and Rosewood).
The seventh day I brought a lovely German woman, Claudia, that I met at the hostel. She and her husband Christof are school teachers and are taking a year off to hitchhike around the world. I was so impressed especially because there are not many people that would feel comfortable embracing so much newness in their 50s/60s. We both worked on a design but at the end of the day we were quite tired and didn’t have the energy to also go and print the designs. But this day was also my proudest work! It felt like I'd come a long way. The design is Mongolian folded script calligraphy, meaning "Mongolia." A cool little mix of cultures. We went back to the hostel, me deciding I would use the next day as my final day of learning and her saying maybe she could come back a different day to do the printing with her husband.
When I came for the last day, Veer had to leave for an emergency to help his daughter at home and I went with his brother Bhupendra to the printing place. I spent the whole morning/early afternoon messing around with the possibilities and in the end was thrilled with how it turned out. I had chai with his family (wife and daughter) and then he took me back to Veer’s studio, where I wasn’t able to say goodbye to Veer since he was still at home. But I bought some carving tools because I want to be able to continue working on the skill.
I was a bit off-put because, while I thought it was normal and even important to pay for his teachings, my friends in Mongolia said they tried to pay and he insisted that they don’t, so instead they bought some blocks from him. I asked him what I owed (thinking I would do as my friends had done before) and he asked 500 per day, which in the western world is not much but here goes a long way. I felt weird, mostly because we hadn’t established a price before I came (since I'd understood there wasn't one), and because while it was normal I pay his usual rate at first, I required less and less of his time as I went on and even brought him more business, and also made him a poster to advertise him in my hostel (he had no advertising at all prior). In the end I'm happy to support him but felt a little taken advantage of, because I worked hard for the money I saved away and it's not a place I was expecting to spend much. Funny how India was my most expensive trip to date and it was only two weeks... But, well, it's something I've been thinking about a lot! And while the above was my initial reaction, I realized I'm being stingy as heck and he is a great guy with a nice family and is maintaining a beautiful traditional art. I am happy to pay him whatever and support his craft and his teaching. Next time I do something similar I will clarify their rate beforehand so that I'm not caught off-guard.
Overall, the experience with Veer was unique and remarkable. He is so talented and it was insightful to learn from a true master. He and his workers were so supportive, and it was cute the way that they would go see their other friends in the street (which was all block carvers) and show off their designs—everyone supported each other’s work (their pride and joy). I learned a great deal about Indian culture from him too and it was a cool exchange of cultures and learning.
I'll post the rest of my experience in India soon!
I've fallen behind in my reading of your blog, and my desire to jump aboard the rickshaw or horse or yak or god knows what mad conveyance you are on, to ride along and witness your adventures. That's what your posts are like; the little details and the complete humanism, from hunger and unexpected foods to toilets and traffic and moments of anxiety on dark streets; I feel like I am beside you and absorbing your remarkable experiences! Thank you for sharing all this! I love you and am so proud of you (and amazed as always by your fabulous courage and spirit!). Love, EB