I’ve arrived in Baruipur with just one small suitcase and
yet I carry with me an abundant load. Trees and their many colored leaves, rooftops and bridges, and gallons after gallons of not one or two, but three ever-replenishing rivers. I am piggybacking family, friends, and lovers. Both my living and my dead. Their voices, embraces, haircuts, good and bad. Bloodied fingers and scarred eyebrows deliver me to this place. I open my bag and all this pours out. A toothbrush can be forgotten. These things cannot be left behind.

“Home has become a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows anymore. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promise to take us home, but are metaphors of homelessness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to redefine the blessed word?”

This quote comes from Salman Rushdie’s short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” It is part of a collection titled East, West. I came across the quote while living on the Thailand/Burma border, surrounded by displaced people who are being forced to redefine the blessed word. Learning about their experience and having voluntarily displaced myself from my own native land, I was prompted to think about relationships to home in all its various and scattered forms an accumulation of knowledge and sense of memory rooted in a particular geography and yet separable from it.

Now, once again, I’ve come as a traveler from the West to take up temporary residence in the East and I continue to explore the Concept of home from a state of dislocation. At the project site of Chaudhuri Bari, I’ve established HOME School – a centre for the investigation of home­related phenomenon. The school draws on the experience of the workshop community, a group of individuals coming from near and far, representing diverse cultures andbackgrounds. What does home mean to this collection of travelers? How is the concept different from person to person? Are the differences cultural or individual? How do different political climates influence concepts of home and connections to place? How do we carry home with us and project it onto new and unfamiliar spaces? These questions are the springboard for research conducted at HOME School.

Participants are encouraged to engage as both teachers and students. As teachers they are asked to share a skill or an area of knowledge that is significant to their concept o_f home. Such classes include: how to cook Begun Pora (a common Bengali dish), how to speak Pittsburgh-ese (a dialect of English unique to the city of Pittsburgh) and an ironic twist on the Indian style of cleaning the floor. All classes are open to the workshop community and Khoj artists and organizers are invited to attend as students.