Notes from the Desert, Gauri Gill's photography

Back in Delhi, I proposed an essay to the political weekly where I worked about what it was like being a girl in a village school, but I was told my idea lacked a “news peg” or a subject that more urban readers might relate to. I decided to take a month-long sabbatical and spend it in rural Rajasthan. 
I started by travelling from school to school, crisscrossing the state through Jaipur, Jodhpur, Osiyan, Bikaner, Barmer, Phalodi, Baran, and Churu districts, photographing mainly in the villages.
In the town of Lunkaransar, I visited an experimental school for nomadic Jogi children. I met Urma and Halima, who invited me home with them and introduced me to Bhana Nathji, Urma’s father and a respected community leader. He was to become my friend and sage guide until he passed away in 2019. We sat in their mud home, on the bed with the snakes and chameleons and rooster underneath, Urma’s brothers and their hunting dogs around us, and Bhana Nathji invited me to travel with them.
In Barmer district, lost, I came upon a group of women in dark ajrak shawls standing around the corpse of a little girl. They looked intimidating, but one of them, Izmat, grasped my hands and, with a conviction born of her own great suffering, impressed upon me that, on my return to Delhi, I must tell people of the troubles of those in Barmer. She took my address and, in letters dictated to literate acquaintances, urged me to return. I did. Looking at schools opened out a world. I realised school was only the microcosm of a complex reality I knew nothing about, having grown up mainly in cities.

On my numerous visits to western Rajasthan, to meet with essentially the same people and places, I have witnessed the whole spectrum of life: drought years and the year of a great monsoon — when Barmer became Kashmir, dust storms that can give you a fever and a flood bad enough for Urma’s home to need rebuilding. I have followed the farming cycle, migration, men travelling to work in Gujarat and Maharashtra, Food for Work programmes, MNREGA and other government schemes, nomadic journeys, epidemics, cerebral malaria, tuberculosis, overwhelmed hospitals and understaffed schools, death from snakebite, from accidents, from being burned alive for providing an inadequate dowry, from growing old, the death of a camel in a year remembered as the year of the death of the camel, births, marriages, child marriages, moneylenders, dharnas, national and panchayat elections, festivals, feuds passed down over generations, celebrations, prayers ... and, through it all, my friends, by whom I was led.
To live poor and landless in the desert amounts to an inescapable reliance on oneself, on each other, and on nature. The stakes are high, the elements close, and life is as cheap as the jokes are rampant. To sleep out on the icy-cold dunes in the winter, with only some tarpaulin and heavy old quilts, means everyone must huddle in, and breathe collectively into the quilt, along with the dogs. One isn’t quite sure what is what or who is who in the tangle.