Agricultural Rituals and Practices in Kangra Valley

in Module
Published on: 16 July 2018

Lakshmi Swaminathan

After graduating as an architect from Chennai, Lakshmi worked for over a year and a half at Matharoo associates in Ahmedabad. After teaching in an architecture college for two years she began to understand the origin of crafts and went on to learn weaving and block printing in order to pursue her interest in textile crafts. For the last year she has been working with Didi Contractor in Himachal Pradesh, and has assisted her with the book 'An Adobe Revival - Didi Contractor's Architecture' by Joginder Singh. She is currently working on mud building projects. Being an avid traveler, the past has always interested Lakshmi, and she loves to understand tangible realities via intangible processes.

This module contains a series of multimedia elements that elaborate the stories echoing through the mountains of the Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, whether in the form of song, theatre, or traditional painting techniques. The stories are set across lines of kinship, usually between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. Thematically, the stories elude to nature, resource use and mountain life, sometimes serving as advice on how to live, and at other times becoming a source of local history. While the tales are particularly Himachali in nature, they also resonate with folk forms across North India.