Plain tales from the hills

Five weeks had passed in McLeod Ganj. It was beginning to show. All the signs were in place: I had begun retching at the sight of beaded necklaces and foaming at the lips at the sound of bongo jam sessions (I’m not joking, they happen). Although I have been known to enjoy its stranger aspects, I had grown weary of the traveller scene, of which McLeod Ganj is a regional capital, with its endless procession of ‘laid back’ budget traveller ‘hangouts’ – by which I mean bizarre Western-Indian hybrid restaurants or cafes piping out soothing ethnic music, with hippies wrapped up in shawls stationed in their dark corners dozing or, worse, making loud conversation with other hippies about whatever they happen to be ‘thinking’ of that day. ‘You know, the thing I’ve found about India is…. (insert nauseating cod-profundity here).’

I hope I have painted a suitably lurid picture – because it is lurid (trust me), and quite enough to chill the blood of any sensible Englishman, for whom enlightenment is an altogether distasteful project and yoga an inoffensive form of physical exercise, nothing more. When you start moaning about ‘bloody white people’ you know its time to move on to somewhere a little less trodden over. And so I took the bus to Chamba, a town in north-western Himachal Pradesh – to accept the wholesome sandwich of destiny that fate would serve me.

It was a change to another extreme: I must have been the only ‘bloody white person’ in a hundred mile radius. Only bloody Indians – friendly, expansive Indians, I must add. Living in such a cosmopolitan country as England (less so Scotland, but still), it can come as a surprise just how racially uniform much of the rest of the world is. Despite the monolithic north-south/Aryan-Dravidian divide, a small and dwindling population of Chinese in Calcutta, and the notable exception of the heavily tribal areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and the North-Eastern states (Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and so on), India is a strikingly mono-ethnic nation. Even metropolitan centres like Delhi and Bombay are completely free of the ethnic ghetto-isation that characterise cities in the West; there is nothing akin to the Latino or Russian ‘quarters’ you’d find in New York, or the Thai restaurants run by immigrant Thais you’d find in London. Just a hell of a lot of Indians – 1.2 billion of them, last I saw. An Indian equivalent of the BNP wouldn’t know where to start – there simply aren’t enough foreigners to blame stuff on (although Muslims too often constitute the other in Indian society, as BJP rhetoric has been known to attest to).

It is one of the most striking imbalances between first and third world nations, a cosmopolitan drain from the south to the global north. Perhaps the see-saw will tip the other way, with the decline of Euro-America and the rise of Chindia, as the dual (if uneven) rise of the two nations has been crassly labelled. Imagine: the British, a beleaguered minority in India, descendants of economic migrants, populating the more deprived sectors of Delhi and Bombay – not inconceivable. Britain has certainly become a less appetising place in which to forge one’s career/fortune, and even America has lost something of its promised-land allure. There are certainly far fewer Indians seeking a fresh start for themselves and their families in Britain. Why would they want to go there? Far better to move to Bombay and live in one of its festering slums, waiting for the breaks that land for the lucky few.

I had arrived in Chamba right smack in the middle of the annual harvest festival: something of a park fair held on a football pitch, complete with ferris wheels, candyfloss vendors, promotional stalls, a stage hosting god-awful Hindi pop music performances (which extended far into the night, cutting into my precious sleep) and no discernable reference to agriculture. It proved a mixed blessing for me. Although I got to witness a bizarre and slightly grotesque parody of English fairground culture, which is always fun, finding a room for the night was a prolonged, harrowing nightmare. I eventually found somewhere, at double this price it should have been, and went off to see Chamba’s historic and rather beautiful temples, which relieved an otherwise rather dull, workaday provincial town.

I headed to Bharmour the next morning. My guidebook described the road there as a ‘perilous track prone to frequent landslides.’ No understatement; it was one of the most terrifying three and a half hours of my life. I’d almost sooner sit through David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again. Wait, actually, no; I’d rather fancy my chances with tumbling boulders. Anyhow, I arrived at around lunch time, safe and thankful, without having faced any serious challenges to my mortality. The entrance to the small town was framed by a multi-coloured, fairy-cake archway of lurid pinks and blues, with the gods Hanuman and Ganesh stood in giant relief on either pillar – the cheery sentinels of Bharmour.

Many complain about the creeping Punjabi-isation of Himachal Pradesh. Punjabis, I must add, with their allegedly course speech and manners and brash displays of wealth – theirs is the richest state in the country – are subjected in India to the similar sort of snobbery the British reserve for the ‘done-good’ Essex man. Delhi, for instance, is often said to have been ‘invaded by the Punjab’, and it is true that Punjabi immigrants make up much of Delhi’s new entrepreneurial class. Bharmour, however, remains the stoutly traditional home of the Gaddi Rajputs – a pastoral, goat-grazing people with their own language and idiosyncratic store of Hindu folklore, and one of the indigenous peoples of the Indian Himalaya.

I once had a rather bizarre conversation – more of lecture, as I noted half an hour into it – with a Gaddi travel agent in McLeod Ganj. The man launched into a mournful paean to his (apparently) dwindling people, and the ignominy they had suffered under the incursions of mainstream Indian society, with its aberrant plans for the ‘modernisation’ of their ancestral lands. He went on and on, as I sat there nodding, claiming the Gaddi to be the original guardians of India’s natural inheritance, who still considered the Aryans (the stock from which North Indians generally derive their ancestry) to be foreign intruders who continue to misuse and exploit their land.

It was the stuff of a tear-jerking Bollywood historical epic – The Last of the Gaddis, in which evil pot-bellied developers start crapping all over the sacred wood, until a young hero (whose parents are savagely killed by a JCB in the opening frames) takes up the family bow-and-arrow, unused since the days of his great grandfather, and begins the fight for his people. A few song-and-dance numbers may need to thrown in, a crafty Pakistani would need to rear his head at some point, and large-breasted women in wet saris might need to gyrate inexplicably around the hero for a bit – but that should be enough to secure some Bombay mafia funding.

Bharmour itself had a collection of exquisite ancient Shiva temples arranged around a paved square at the heart of town, which also served as school yard where smartly dressed children ran around hitting each other. That was about it – so I headed out of town onto the hillside that rose steeply above Bharmour, with the purpose of stumbling awkwardly into the traditional Gaddi villages that dotted the area. This I did with zest.

The peasant locals didn’t know what hit them; as with Chamba, I was the only foreigner around. Kids spotted me from a while off, peering through their wooden window frames, and began jumping up and down, unable to contain their excitement at the approach of a sweaty white man in a Tintin in Tibet t-shirt (a bit of McLeod Ganj chic there). Old men in grimed waistcoats, hunched over their walking sticks, stared at me with a mixture of suspicion and dry amusement – some ventured to ask the question I have lobbed at me several times a day in South Asia: ‘what is your country?’ (Often suffixed with ‘sir’ or ‘friend’, and sometimes extended into an elaborate interrogation session, in which my name, my age, my marital status and my father’s job is teased from me with steely determination.) The women, normally a diminutive bunch in India, looked up from their weaving or dusting or clothes-thrashing to grin warmly at me. Even the livestock appeared interested, albeit a little disturbed.

I have yet to receive this sort of treatment in a British country village – although I would certainly welcome it. What with the industrial revolution, we no longer have any proper peasants to speak of (except maybe in Wales, but that’s just Wales, and they’re welcome to them). Shame. I want our peasants back.

I made my way upwards through the roughly paved streets of a Gaddi village. The houses were handsome, crumbling rectangles supported by finely carved wooden beams and sheltered with layerings of slate tiles. They followed a simple rustic formula: humans on the overhanging first floor, cows and chickens on the cracked stone courtyard beneath, with a warped wooden ladder connecting the two. Children with healthy layers of dirt on their faces teased the cows as they munched thoughtfully on dry grass and shat elegantly onto the paving stones. Women with patterned headscarves returned from the fields at sunfall with wicker baskets of freshly scythed crop on their backs. Elderly patriarchs sat smoking pipes, framed in their door lintels. It was precisely this sort of bucolic rural Arcadia, belying a hardy lifestyle, which drew me to this remote corner of Himachal Pradesh. I am an unrepentant Orientalist. Edward Said can turn in his grave as he pleases – like a spit roast, for all I care. (Yeah, take that outdated university humanity syllabuses; I am so over you).

On my way back to Bharmour, with the light of the day dimming fast, I stumbled quite literally into a Gaddi wedding. I found it in one of the many preliminary stages of the Indian marriage process, in which the groom and his family visit the bride’s family home and are subjected to a variety of interminable rituals, where Sanskrit is mumbled by a dour-faced Brahmin and an array of sparkly things are thrown everywhere. (They do like their sparkly things, Indians.) The bride’s house was a pearl-white, heavily pillared, mock-Palladian monstrosity, of the sort that South Asian villagers often have built on arriving into big money, having first demolished their beautiful ancestral homes and sold off their carved wooden window frames. A sort of rural Indian bling, I suppose, and a sure sign of status in the community.

A young man dressed in a Western suit – the rest wore pyjamas and turbans – caught my eye and ushered me into the throng of guests in the courtyard. I found myself a patch of ground and squatted awkwardly, as a vast and sickly bounty of sweets was shoved in my face. In the corner was perched a group of elderly village ladies, who sang hypnotic, melancholy folk songs in the Gaddi language – so the young suited man informed me, as he kept up a running commentary on the proceedings. A brother of the groom, he now lived in Ludhiana, a large industrial city in the Punjab, and was training in the hospitality industry. ‘An area of growth,’ he stated proudly, going to on to suggest plans of moving abroad. When I announced my exit, he escorted me out of the house, and fought off a mentally challenged villager who lunged at me on the footpath outside.

The following evening I was taking a stroll down the hillside, to investigate another Gaddi village a little below Bharmour. It was around half six, and the sky was just beginning to darken. The perfect time of day for walking – pleasantly cool, with everything under a soft, golden light. Having a good look around the village, I continued further down the hillside. As I made my way along a narrow dirt path that bordered a stream, I encountered a middle-aged Gaddi man shepherding two cows back to the village. He had a curved black moustache and a red pillar-box hat with a feather tucked into the front.

On seeing me he started, and began waving furiously with gestures that spoke: ‘get the fuck back to the village – right now, idiot.’ He repeatedly shouted ‘balu! balu!’ – which translates as ‘bear’, as Jungle Book enthusiasts can easily attest to – and made scratching motions across his face. It became clear that vicious bears roamed the wooded hillside at dusk; it was a dangerously stupid time of day to be taking a ramble. Not doubting his authority on the local wildlife and its capacity for violence, I followed him back to the village, where he showed me his orchard and harangued me into taking four of his reddest, ripest apples. He then escorted me to his house, introduced me to his wife, offered tea, and even implored me to stay for the night. Reeling at this onslaught of Gaddi hospitality, I made my excuses and hurried back to Bharmour before the sun fell.

The bus ride back to Chamba began at 6.30 am after my second night in Bharmour, with very few passengers on board – in India, to think! The rusted vehicle started to trundle, with much deafening clanking and thundering, down the narrow mountain path. The ash-white mist that had gathered in the night thinned as the sun rose higher. An hour into it the bus was waved down by a group of men stood in the middle of the road. A landslide had happened – I wasn’t to miss out after all; joy – and we joined a queue of stationary vehicles, waiting for a double-team of JCBs to push a considerable heap of boulders into the valley bellow. It took them only around half an hour – excellent machines, JCBs – and we were on our way again, with no further rock-related fun to enliven our journey.

At Chamba I changed buses and continued onto Dalhousie, one of those former British administrative hillstations, like Shimla and Mussoorie and Darjeeling, replete with mock-Tudor houses, Anglican churches, elite boarding schools and elderly Indian men with handlebar moustaches and stripy woollen pullovers. Like McLeod Ganj, it was named after another of the infinite Scotsmen who administered the Raj. The scene was set by the Dalhousie Club (est. 1895) near the bus stand, a venerable colonial institution with a wood-panelled interior decorated with hunting trophies and framed black-and-white photographs of sunburnt Britishers in shorts and pith helmets. The monsoon had reduced the badminton court outside to a sad swamp, and it was clear that the place had seen finer decades. There being a number of barracks stationed a little below Dalhousie – the town was founded as a military garrison – the Club membership now consists largely of pudgy army officers, the ‘old chaps’ who still maintain their crusty Edwardian speech and affectations, alongside a fondness for imported Scotch whisky.

I’d love to tell you more about Dalhousie, but there simply isn’t much to the town. Not that that’s a criticism; it’s the sort of place to stroll around idly, admiring the beautiful vista of rolling greens hills and steep river valleys, preferably equipped with a pipe, walking stick and a membership card to the local tennis club. I wasn’t properly equipped, tragically, but I had a pleasant enough couple of days. Indeed, it was the sort of ‘pleasant’ not normally associated with India – more with the Cotswolds or Stratford upon Avon. I headed back to McLeod Ganj at 7:15 am – as scenic a five hour bus ride as I could possibly have asked for. I arrived mid-afternoon, and there they were: white people – everywhere.

I’ve just checked my word count – 2,629. Gosh, I thought to myself; the work I put in for you people! What’s my motivation? Attention seeking, perhaps, alongside a selfless desire to inform and entertain – naturally. Anyhow, I can’t be bothered to type any more. I could tell you about Chandigarh and Delhi – and then there’s the small matter that I happen to be writing all this from Sri Lanka, a beautiful and fascinating island I could also go on about at length. But I grow weary and the word count keeps going up the more I type. (Funny, that.) So, I shall leave you all hanging, vertiginously, unable to get on with your lives and plagued with loss of sleep. Bye for now.

McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala: portrait of a rainy hillstation

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Sat at just bellow 2,000 metres in the north-western corner of Himachal Pradesh, India, the former British administrative hillstation of McLeod Ganj – annexed after the Second Anglo-Sikh War and named after a Scottish Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Sir Donald Friell McLeod – should by rights be a model of sleepy, Anglo-Indian quaintness. Yet, in the course of the last fifty years, it has become an international capital of Tibetan culture and Vajrayana tantric Buddhism – and a Mecca for Free Tibet activists and general do-gooders from across the world.

The home of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, since he fled Tibet in the wake of a failed uprising in Lhasa, McLeod Ganj continues to house thousands of Tibetan refugees whose numbers swell as fresh arrivals pour over the Himalayan divide, escaping the persecution and dearth of religious freedom that has only worsened since the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. For them it is a place of sanctuary, where their freedom to both worship and protest is for the most part guaranteed and their ancient culture is permitted to flourish – albeit on a life-support machine of Indian governmental assistance and Western aid which cannot be relied upon forever. Their situation remains precarious in McLeod Ganj – and many find themselves returning to Tibet, frustrated by the lack of work and grieved at the estrangement from their families – but for the moment they can enjoy a climate of hope and mutual support, as against the climate of fear and mutual suspicion that persists in Chinese-controlled Tibet.

But with the frost-bitten Tibetan runaways come other visitors: brash nouveaux riche Punjabis flood in on weekends in their honking cars; lank-haired, heavily bangled hippies step wearily from the overnight buses from Delhi or Manali; earnest American high school students with bags of malaria pills arrive for cultural exchange programmes. A cultural and spiritual free-for-all, McLeod Ganj achieves that kind of cosmopolitanism particular to Indian visitor-hubs like Varanasi and Auroville.

Many on carefully worked out backpacking itineraries arrive with the intention of staying just a couple of days. But, jaded after weeks under the rigours of Indian travel and finding themselves suddenly in a cool climate among beautiful hills, with cheap meditation/yoga/language courses and volunteer opportunities all about them, they end up staying for weeks, often months. Many initial travellers end up dedicating their lives to the small town and its Tibetan population, interspersing their time there with stints back home working low-end jobs to feed their McLeod habit. For many it fulfils the tired cliché of finding oneself in India.

McLeod Ganj has been called the NGO capital of India. And, with the trendiness of the Free Tibet cause set alongside the popularity of Buddhism and Tibetan culture in a West grown increasingly neurotic at its perceived spiritual vacuum, it is well supplied with people eager to aid the refugee population in whatever way they can. Teaching English is the most common pursuit, to Tibetan adults as much as to children – a skill that most visitors in at least some measure possess, even if few volunteers are qualified in any formal way. It is made ultra accessible and, with the different NGOs fanned across the small town, the visitor is confronted with a buffet of teaching opportunities they can march into that very day.

The stream of practical support from eager foreigners, which grows almost competitive during the high seasons of early summer (May/June) and autumn (October/November), is reinforced with hefty donations from Free Tibet societies based in wealthy Western nations. The Tibetan Children’s Village, for instance – an ‘educational community’ in McLeod Ganj, providing free education for Tibetan children in exile, with further branches dotted across India from Ladakh in the north to Bylakuppe in the south – is a mammoth operation funded by private donors and international aid organisations. Such handsome assistance has led some to declare exiled Tibetans, a little callously perhaps, as the richest refugees in the world. What Tibetans lack in overt political assistance from national governments, is in some measure made up for by a sustained outpouring of charity from across the globe. But it is the former, and the dearth of it despite odd kind words from individual politicians, that must ultimately sway the balance for Tibet.

Although the Dalai Lama has met privately with all former American presidents in his lifetime, George W. Bush was the first to stage a public meeting with His Holiness, and awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. But, however much China loathes these stunts and is quick to make its displeasure known to the countries that host them, powerful nations such as America have not matched them with any concrete political action. The punishing economic sanctions regularly meted out to Burma and North Korea have not been entertained, let alone applied, to China. This is pure realpolitik; China’s rise in power and economic clout has consigned Western nations to straightjackets – and with China effectively owning America’s vast national debt and funding its oversized military machine, the ‘leader of the free world’ is unable to lead in any meaningful way. In a world that nobody rules, words are light currency.

Even the ‘stances’ taken by Western governments regarding Tibet, with occasional noises made about Human Rights and such, are growing rarer and even now being subverted. The then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in a written ministerial statement issued on October 29th 2008, renegaded on a 94 year old diplomatic position, with its roots in the British Empire’s interest in Tibet as buffer against Russia and China. This recognised China’s ‘special position’ and ‘suzerainty’ in Tibet, but not Chinese sovereignty, and was entrenched in international law, with the UN Security Council recognising it as distinct from other ‘provinces’ of China. Miliband declared this distinction and the very notion of ‘suzerainty’ to be outdated, going on to say that, ‘Like every other EU member state, and the United States, we regard Tibet as part of the People's Republic of China’.

In October 2009, Barack Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama on the latter’s visit to Washington, until he had first met with the Chinese president Hu Jintao in Beijing the next month. Although Obama later met with him in February and expressed his solidarity, it was the first such snub to be given to His Holiness by an American president, and couldn’t help but look like a bad omen. In a weakened, cash-strapped America – and Britain – the well-meaning gestures of the past are simply too expensive.

Much of this stems, no doubt, from the growing hopelessness of the Tibetan cause, and a reluctance to anger a potential ally through gestures towards increasingly fanciful political goals. The Dalai Lama has downgraded his demands to the Middle Way Approach, advocating greater political autonomy and the right to elect a regional government within China, while allowing Beijing to maintain control of defence and diplomacy. Despite odd grumblings about ‘defeatism’ by more radical outfits like the Tibetan Youth Congress, the Middle Way Approach, entailing the renunciation of hopes of true independence, has been accepted by the great majority of Tibetans. But even this moderate approach has failed to garner results. Much-vaunted talks between China and the exile government – held in stages before and after the Olympic Games, and largely as a result of the violent protests proceeding it in March 2008 across Tibet – proved to be a humiliating walk up the garden path, with the Chinese ultimately refusing to budge on anything that smacked of ‘separatism’ from the Motherland, despite the insistence of the Dalai Lama’s envoys that calls for ‘meaningful autonomy’ did not violate China’s constitution.

Many assert that Tibet has now missed any chance it might have had of finding a solution, and its rise in power and influence will make China ever less sensitive to international opinion. Furthermore, the notion of a ‘free’ Tibet within China, with the full trappings of democracy and a system of rights, alongside a mainland China which denies these absolutely, is a fantasy. A free Tibet presupposes a free China. Tibet must pin its hopes on a nationwide democratic revolution within China, whose stirrings may well start a long way from the Tibetan plateau.

Yet the Dalai Lama, even in his old age, remains highly active in drumming up support for the Tibetan cause throughout the world, with a dizzying timetable of lectures and audiences and meetings with high profile individuals (even if many of them are Hollywood celebrity groupies). In this way he continues to foster an atmosphere of hope among Tibetans, illusory or otherwise – which, after even a brief stay in McLeod Ganj, becomes infectious. According to many Tibetan exiles, the foremost reason for their dangerous escape over the Himalayas – beyond even political persecution and the chance of a fully Tibetan education for their children, so they say – is the chance to meet the Dalai Lama, a privilege allotted to every newly escaped exile. A similar impetus is found in the many foreign visitors who make their own rather less perilous journeys to the hillstation. However, much to their chagrin, they are rarely granted an audience. The days when interested travellers could rock up to McLeod Ganj and casually organise a conversation with His Holiness are long past, due to the growing demand of His presence across the globe, the much-increased tourist traffic, and the increasing fragility of his health at the age of 75.

The worldwide popularity of Tenzin Gyatso, with his bestselling books and DVDs and sold-out teaching tours, has almost singlehandedly kept the Free Tibet torch alight within the international conscience, even if this has never been satisfactorily translated into the policy of any government. For Tibetans he has become a living embodiment not only of compassion, but of Tibetan nationhood itself, to any extent never dreamed in pre-invasion Tibet with its diverse centres of both political and spiritual power (the Dalai Lama is head of only one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelupa, and formerly was not the spiritual leader of all Tibetans). He has brought the Tibetan people, formerly divided by language and geography and religious sects, under one tent. One of the few pleasant upshots of exile governance, Tibetans have, away from home, become one people for the very first time.

But if the charm and influence of His Holiness is the greatest weapon in the Tibetan armoury, it is also Tibet’s chief weakness. The aspirations of Tibetans have become so concentrated in the person of Tenzin Gyatso, his probable death in the next decade or so would leave them bereft. He does enjoy the divine caveat of reincarnation, permitting His work to be continued afresh in the body of a small boy in some corner of Tibet. But the totalitarian nature of Chinese rule complicates this hugely, as China seeks to control, rather absurdly and with zero popular mandate, the spiritual as well as the political sources of power in Tibet. The Dalai Lama’s identification on May 14, 1995, of the six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the reincarnate (11th) Panchen Lama – the second highest spiritual authority in Tibet, who is in turn charged with locating reincarnate Dalai Lamas – resulted in tragedy. The boy from Lhari County was immediately imprisoned by the Chinese. With the dubious distinction of being the youngest political prisoner in the world, his whereabouts remain unknown; many fear him dead. With typical hubris and ignorance of the workings of piety, China then went on to select their own ‘official’ Panchen Lama, Gyancain Norbu, who predictably commands no respect among Tibetans. Something equally farcical but damaging is likely to result with the death of the Dalai Lama, made worse by the absence of even a properly authoritative Panchen Lama to select his reincarnation.

Tenzin Gyatso is fully aware of this perhaps insoluble problem, and the possible collapse of the institution of the Dalai Lama itself. He has tried his utmost to wean Tibetans off their absolute dependence on him, and has made steps to devolve his power onto something approaching a democratic apparatus in the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. There exists now an elected parliament, a Kashag (cabinet) made up of the heads of various ministries, and as of the year 2000 a directly elected Kalon Tripa (Prime Minister). Although His Holiness remains the head of state, there now exists a power structure capable in theory of providing continuity and sustained political will in the event of His death. However, the Tibetan exile community’s lack of enthusiasm for this modern, secular, democratic alternative to traditional feudal power – voter turnout in both priministerial and parliamentary elections, held once every four years, is invariably dismal – hardly inspires confidence. Tibet after the Dalai Lama looks set to be more uncertain and vulnerable than it has ever been.

Now, then, is the time to visit McLeod Ganj, with the Dalai Lama still vigorously alive and the Free Tibet cause still energetic and hopeful. It is a bubble than cannot keep afloat forever, and must some day burst either through a grim acceptance of defeat or, at last, a free Tibet. In the meanwhile we can pray for the latter outcome; the suffering and resilience of the Tibetan people deserve nothing less.

This book is intended to be written in

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Colombo’s Barefoot Gallery is hosting an exhibition and has launched two new book projects by three of the most innovative artists now practising in South Asia. Sri Lankan artist Arjuna Gunarathne’s exhibition Me, Myself and I was opened alongside the promotion of Pakistani artists Imran Qureshi’s and Aisha Khalid’s Side by Side and Name Class Subject.

Through the medium of the book, Qureshi and Khalid renegotiate the status of the artwork as a pristine object aloof from the interactions of everyday life. Not to make their artworks out as arch and stuffy – far from it. Both are carried out with wit and irreverence. They do not wish for their viewers/readers to treat their works piously, as near-sacred objects they daren’t touch. On the contrary, they want the owners of their books to draw on them, write on them, deface them, do whatever they like with them; it’s theirs after all. As the text buried within the pages of Name Class Subject makes clear: ‘this book is intended to be written in.’

With Side by Side Imran Qureshi offers up two individual books, which the title invites us to consider as companion pieces. Yet the difference is stark: one is a far larger production (209 x 275mm) called The True Path, an imaginative take on the children’s join-the-dots playbook, where a line of numbered dots traverses from page to page across an abstract thread of natural forms – a landscape at turns benign and sinister. Very much a narrative work, the line – to be filled in by the ‘reader’, who, in an inversion of the traditional hierarchy, becomes the final author of the work – becomes a heroic character in its own right and sets off on a picaresque adventure, leaping and falling, dodging missiles and scaling boulders, and transforming into umbrellas and trees.

Qureshi’s accompanying book, Moderate Enlightenment, is by contrast a small hardback booklet (120 x 180) containing what at first appears to be a collection of Mughal-esque miniature portraits, beautifully rendered in the traditional style with bright slabs of colour and intricate brushwork. On closer inspection, however, what on first glance seemed to be Mughal courtier becomes a bearded man with a Nike satchel, and a hijab-clad woman is found to be wearing blue jeans. These exquisite paintings aim for a more rounded, human portrait of the pious Pakistani – who, despite the crude generalisations about Muslims that have proliferated during the American-led War on Terror, is fully capable of combining sincere religious faith with secular pursuits and concerns, and can not be reduced as a person solely to his or her religion.

Name, Class, Subject is itself something of a double book project, although bound within one frame. It is drawn from Aisha Khalid’s schooldays in Pakistan, and captures the period of confusion and disquiet when English text books were introduced into her formerly Urdu-dominated curriculum – a juncture in her life in which her cultural certainties and very identity began to fracture. From a state of innocence she was initiated into the complexities of a bilingual, post-colonial society in which proficiency in English is a fast-track to success and a badge of prestige. The book takes the form of a plain hard-back exercise book, with two front-covers on either side – with ‘Name, Class, Subject’ and the accompanying dotted spaces inscribed in English on one side, and in Urdu on the other; the former inviting the ‘student’ to work from left to right, and vice-versa with the latter. The simple hierarchy of the two-tier language system is illustrated by the varying quality of the different sides: the English half features a more elaborate four-line layout on each page, while the ‘inferior’ Urdu half uses a plainer single-line format and is stuffed full of mocked-up printing errors, with pages unaligned or stuck in upside down with their corners dog-eared. Despite its authentic appearance, the book is in fact a collection of over 300 original paintings of ruled pages, in the manner of traditional Mughal miniature painting. Furthermore, as above, the artwork is surrendered to the owner to be finished – he or she must write between the lines.

Arjuna Gunarathne’s exhibition Me, Myself and I is, in a similar spirit, a profoundly autobiographical collection of miniature pen-on-paper line drawings that chart the Sri Lankan artist’s experience of alienation and cultural displacement while living in London with his wife and first child and working in a supermarket. Each one is a black ink self-portrait, cartoonish and often highly abstract. Every full-length figure is deprived of a head, which is replaced by houses, mountain rages, smoke trails and indiscernible, ominous shapes. The denial to the subject of the face, the body-part through which communication is mediated, leaves him vulnerable and isolated on the page, and reflects the artist’s estrangement from those that surrounded him in London. It furthermore robs the figure of a distinct identity, allowing it to extend beyond the self-portrait and embody the common immigrant experience. At times almost the entire body is obliterated by a storm cloud or black smudge marks, suggesting Gunarathne’s complete disappearance as a person, beneath an alien cultural hegemony that denies him full recognition. The exhibition will be held in the Barefoot Gallery from now until August 25 (open 10am–7pm weekdays, 11am–5pm Sundays), with an accompanying booklet of the drawings to be sold alongside.

The three artists are linked by a common experience of studying art in Pakistan, and share a grounding in miniature painting. Their works here were curated by Sharmini Pereira, the founder and acting director of Raking Leaves, a not-for-profit independent publishing imprint which commissions two book projects each year, from artists from across the world. For more information on the artists, Sharmini Pereira or Raking Leaves, visit http://www.rakingleaves.org/.