Public Buses, Markets, and the Dhaka Arts Center

07/09/13

I was originally mildly disappointed to be going to Dhaka instead of Kolkata for the summer. Kolkata, a city in India, is the other major location in which one might choose to study Bangla. It is known for its history of leftist intellectuals and continues to be seen as a vibrant artistic and cultural destination. Playwrights like Utpal Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore are associated with the city (and if you are a theater person and you don’t know who they are, you should find out, because they are both excellent), and I was also looking forward to visiting Jana Sanskriti, a group near Kolkata that practices Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” techniques. My knowledge of what Dhaka was and is known for was horribly inadequate (we’ll get to that, I promise), but what I had heard was that it was one of the most crowded and overpopulated cities in the world (and it was friendly and good for learning Bangla). To drive the point home, the students studying Bangla in Kolkata this summer through the other program I could have done are all humanities students. Here, there are two of us in a group of fourteen. And while I have already noted how diverse my group’s interests are, the majority of them are studying public health and development in one way or another.

            Which is all lead up to my admitting how very ignorant I was. I should have realized that a city as large and crowded as Dhaka has the kind of vibrant arts scene that big cities all over the world encourage. But I didn’t. Here is the day in which I realized how wrong I was:

This is Liz. Liz is my adventure buddy. In this photo, she is drinking coconut juice. Directly from a coconut. Like you do.

It was scorchingly hot when Liz and I left to meet my LP at the Shawra Railgate. We were going to take a public bus for the first time, which was both exciting and terrifying. When we got on the bus, it looked like an extremely run-down version of a Greyhound bus, with torn and faded seat covers and a half-shattered windshield.  There were six rows of seating that were only for women and the rest of the bus was full of men. We stood with my LP, clutching the seats to keep from falling as the bus jerked and weaved its way through traffic. Though the bus was hot, as long as we were moving, there was a breeze that made it tolerable. Luckily, it was also one of the buses that actually stopped, instead of slowing down slightly while you jump off (left foot first so you don’t fall under the wheels as you exit).

Maybe you can't tell, but this was the most crowded market ever.

When we stepped down at Chandni Chowk (a huge indoor/outdoor market for women’s clothing) I could not believe the size of the crowd. Once we stepped into the flow of people, we had no choice but to move along with them. It was less like walking and more like being a part of a river’s current. I am not a person who is prone to claustrophobia, but the first thing I found myself thinking was, “I would be completely screwed if there was a fire. As would everyone in this market.” Luckily, I was quickly distracted and overstimulated by the number of people, fabrics, accessories and ornaments surrounding me (this would come back to bite me later in the day when I realized how extremely dehydrated I had allowed myself to become). Eventually, we were able to fight our way out of the current of the main crowd and into a side eddy where we could actually stop to look at cloth.

This is how you shop for clothes here. Point at a fabric. Check it out. Get enough of one you like and take it to a tailor. Design the outfit with your tailor. He makes it. All for about $20/outfit. This is an overwhelming amount of fabrics to choose from. In case you didn't notice. 

There were hundreds of tiny shops piled floor to ceiling with fabrics in as many colors and prints as you can imagine. There were cottons and silks and linens and blends. There were merchants whose eyes lit up at the sight of foreigners who might pay them more and merchants who entirely ignored us. Anytime one of us saw a fabric we liked, we would stop, point and ask to see it unfolded from the stack. If it seemed worth it, we would then have a conversation about price with the shopkeeper. Once a price was agreed on, the fabric would be handed to us and we would be off to match it to fabric for pants or leggings and an orna/dupatta (basically a scarf you wear draped across your chest for modesty). If we were lucky, the fabric would come in a pre-matched three-piece set. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to make up your own fabric combinations. I, for instance, purchased a black fabric printed with tiny dogs, hearts, and arrows, to which I then added a hot pink and gold yoke (a yoke is a flowery, lacy chest piece that gets sewn onto the fabric) and matched with hot pink pants and a gauzy, hot pink scarf. In Bangladesh, any color goes with any other color; there is no such thing as tacky, and I absolutely love it.

Remember I told you about pani puri? This is a pani puri cart. Yum! 

A quick side-on Bangladeshi clothes shopping (AKA beginner’s fashion design): After you buy the fabric, you take it to a tailor and describe exactly how you want it to be cut for your salwar kameez suit: neckline shape, piping, sleeve length, decorations, top length, pant-type. For people who are new to working with a tailor, this many decisions can be overwhelming, but for me there’s something really enjoyable about being so hands-on in what my clothes will look like. It does, however, mean that getting a new salwar kameez made can take forever; people rarely buy readymade garments here (why would you when they are more expensive and less well-fitted to your unique shape?).

This is Bobby. Bobby is a screenprinter, and those are her prints.

From Chandni Chowk, we headed for Dhanmoondi, a young, artsy neighborhood full of galleries and restaurants. There, we visited an art gallery called Dhaka Art Center where the screenprints, etchings, and sketches of one artist, Biren Shome, were being displayed downstairs and an Oxfam poster contest for defeating world hunger was opening upstairs. The screenprints were stunning. Done mostly in black and white, they depicted women’s faces and upper bodies in a style that felt strikingly unique but still Bangladeshi. Non-western visual arts tend to be treated as either derivative of western masters or primitively native (which I find detestable), but it is also true in every artistic field that the influence of colonization on cultural practices cannot be ignored. The “West” was here and lingers still in the most random places. I thought Shome’s work had just the slightest touch of Picasso, but for me this didn’t detract from his originality in technique, style, and theme. While we were visiting the gallery, we got to meet some younger men and women who are aspiring artists. They were working on their own pieces in the back, and their generosity in sharing their techniques and their work with us was incredible. We may even go back to take a class with them in screenprinting! One of the women, Bobby, gifted me with one of her own screenprints (and her phone number so that we can hang out and talk about art again sometime).

Dhanmoondi is home to many other art galleries, which I hope I have time to explore over the course of this program. I’m still working on tapping into the theater scene, because I have no doubt that I am going to find a lot of quirky and inspiring people there.