Walking with Marco Polo and Italo Calvino
Walking tours are dime a dozen. Name a city, there is a walk: monuments, landmarks, gardens—live postcards put together by local luminaries who are passionate about their town, its past and its life cycles. Which is what makes Half Walks, a peregrination through Delhi under the stewardship of Chandan Gomes and Mahavir Singh Bisht, special. The walks are curated by Shruti Sarkar— a visual arts practitioner and an Assistant Professor at Sushant University, Gurugram at their BFA programme under the School of Art and Architecture. Together they have conducted over 15 walks.
The walks have meeting points in journeys; rendezvous with literature, art, architecture and stories which are identifiable and shared in a deeply personal way. Take for example the walk that the multi-disciplinary theatre artiste Uma Katju conducted around Mandi House. The participants were dressed as fictional characters from a variety of stories. Someone was dressed as the mother from Jerry Pinto’s novel Em and the Big Hoom.
Another participant decided to go totally outlier by becoming a screw in Anant Ambani’s watch! “It was like a moving theatre happening on the street,” recalls Gomes. Delhi has a lot of fun possibilities. Hence in another walk conducted by Gomes, Bisht and Katju, members togged up as fictional characters, such as a chess player from Russia, went pub crawling in Paharganj and Connaught Place.
Direct engagement is another USP of these walks, made more interesting since they are conducted by different people with different personal interests which they wish to share or expect responses from the listeners. Communications professional and poet Chitra Kalyani, whose poem has been published in the anthology Daydreamers, led a walk through Lodhi Garden’s landscaped lawns, old sheltering trees and Mughal ambience where participants ended up reading some of their favourite poetry from books they brought along. A participant read out The Waking by American poet Theodore Roethke while another chose American poet Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese.
These special Sunday strolls are more about the group discovering themselves and their fellow walkers rather than just hearing about the history of a random monument or heritage street where they sell paranthas made in Shah Jahan’s time. Literature is a medium of connection during many of these local expeditions. Dr Silika Mohapatra, an artist who also teaches Philosophy at St Stephen’s College, Delhi University, has a special purpose in leading her group through the labyrinthine lanes of the university’s sprawling North Campus towards the Kamla Nehru Ridge which is the green lung of the varsity.
Holding a well-worn copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—Marco Polo’s recounting to Kublai Khan in brief prose poems about life in 55 imaginary cities all named after women—is a dialogue about life, memory and the human condition; a rather unique way to conduct a walk. What Silika is really doing is inviting her fellow walkers into an ancient, imaginary world in the context of a stubborn wilderness that can be imagined as greater than it is: there are indeed a few Mughal tombs scattered amidst the rich Ridge foliage.
Sharing Calvino with them, she is getting the group to think about the relationships they shared with cities they have lived in. Rummage through your memories, she insists, and share stories about places that have affected you deeply. Such a walk is a personal catharsis or a singular therapy for people who may not even need it by making sense of displacement in a personal context. Still, amid the group walks, she does pause here and there to point out the occasional heritage structure or listen to an anecdote shared by a participant.
These walks are certainly not the kind of tours most Delhiwallahs—or for that matter walkers in any other city—are used to. It demands as much from the participants as it does from the walk leader. Which is precisely why, founders Gomes and Bisht call their venture Half Walks—one half of the experience is illustrated by the hosts and the participants embellish the rest with their personal accounts. “None of the walks are ever the same,” says 35-year-old Bisht, photographer, writer and co-editor of Khirkee Voice, a community arts publication, which focuses on the urban village of Khirkee in Delhi.
Bisht has known 36-year-old Gomes, an independent photographer and filmmaker for more than a decade now, having worked together extensively in Delhi’s visual arts space. The latter has exhibited widely at Kochi Muziris Biennale and Benaki Museum, Athens, among other places. Half Walks came about through their shared love for walking and exploring Delhi. On a rainy day two years ago, they met at Shahpur Jat and decided to take a walk. In seven hours they covered more than 25 km around the area. “Many people believe that Delhi is not walkable, and even those who do, often restrict themselves to parks or heritage locations. During our walk, we realised that there are many hidden spots we might be crossing in our daily lives, but don’t stop to explore because they are unfamiliar to us,” explains Bisht.
Half Walks are so addictive that many conductors are former participants. Hierarchy is loose, and leadership is opportunity. “Sometimes, during our walks, people share fascinating insights about the city. If we find a particular observation intriguing, we invite them to lead a walk,” says Sarkar. There is only one rule: Come with an open mind. You just might end up seeing Delhi again, but not as you know it.
(Instagram page:@halfwalks)