Araku Is The Place, Where We Are Not!

Whether we relish or revile the urban world we dwell in, it is a live metaphor of human power. So, it bosses around to make us believe that gardens of bonsai trees and Croton plants are the ‘nature’. This so-called ‘nature’ is very much to be ‘controlled’ and ‘preserved’. Therefore, actual nature is the place where we, the civilised, urbanised, are not. So, Araku is that original and aboriginal nature with a distinctive tribal agglomeration. Araku Valley of Anantagiri and Sunkarimetta Reserved Forest, is one of the rich biodiversity areas in the Eastern Ghats of India. The hill station in Alluri Sitharaman Raju district, erstwhile Visakhapatnam district, located at about 1,200 MSL, is tucked away in the north-eastern corner of Andhra Pradesh and shares a border with Odisha.

Sometimes I feel that there are some places where I have been very often, but unable to click similar photographs that were shot during my previous visits. When I get myself immensely involved, nature generally extends its helping hand to support me in accomplishing the mission. But, nature at Araku is not like that. It is a unique and oblivion type; it is ever-changing at each glance.

In the life of every photographer, how famous, or how amateurish he/ she is, there must be some moments of moratorium. The moments of inertia truly interpret what we have, what we might lose. My recurring sojourns to Araku keep me in the inert dungeons of solitude to augment my urge to photography as a vital factor of my life. Thus, my creative production of Araku through photographs has an additional dimension in the form of its conservation.

Here are a couple of my photographs that tried to encapsulate the routine of the inhabitants of Araku. While clicking them, I once again realised that beauty resides in their world, not in the lens of the beholder. That realization helped me to use it in the photographs that assisted to direct aesthetic attention to their world of wild serenity and daily vivacity. Here is a tribal woman in a customary work of drawing Rangoli, a magic square drawn on the floor.

The images of women who trek and fetch drinking water daily: they clean the metal pots with nearby natural tamarind & mud and filling the sparkling pots with water they carry them on their heads with a spectacular precision. I photographed a potter, an artisan and a true wizard. He is bestowed by his ancestors with the art of turning the wheel to shape the docile clay into pragmatic shapes. Thumbing the nose to the times of plastic, the ambidextrous potter is creating mundane and rudimentary utensils. As the tribal communities have a conventional connection with the land, the local inhabitants of Araku are mainly dependent upon farming. Besides the paddy, the cash crops like coffee and pepper and fruit trees, including a large harvest of mangoes further supplement the flora and fauna of the vicinity. As the winter embraces Araku, the locality comes live. Foggy veiled terrains are carpeted in green. The popular picturesque and typical local aboriginal ambiences are obviously connected to agricultural activities. Here is an image of a farmer with his cattle to his farm in the twilight of misty winter, during when the mercury levels plummet to zero degrees.

It is the immensity of the monumentally vivid Araku that always affects me deeply. What made me sojourn Araku often: it is the vulnerability of the credulous folks, infallibility of the land and the enduring beauty that transcends both.