Ganesh Gopal Jogi travels from Magrivadu in the Mt. Abu valley, to an Ahmedabad slum. He stops off and on during his peregrinations to sing, play the instruments and to paint. He moves in his striped yellow turban, with his wife Teju carrying a Sarangi and a head load, his children in his arms or following him. He trudges through desolate, undulating rocky land, dotted with thorny shrubs and trees, frequented by tigers stalking and preying on deer, and, by isolated houses, surrounded by cultivators, potters, blacksmiths, women in flared skirts and billowing head scarves. He passes by towns with multi storeyed apartments, schools, balloons carrying tourists, swimming pools, women on scooters, bustling bazaars, train stations and platforms. He sings to pedestrians thronging the city streets, the people framed in doors and windows of their apartments. In an idyllic sylvan landscape, strewn with hillocks, cattle with auspicious thapas or hand prints on their body, he sits down alone below a tree. He strums his strings as the trees sway to his music. He comes upon Krishna fluting as a cow herd in a pointillistically dotted desert landscape, and Krishna turns to listen to him. Ganesh's earthly journey is over. However, through distant vistas, rolling hills and dales, bluffs and spurs, cityscapes and landscapes, his large, keen, kindly eyes, signature turban and beard, look out at the scene spread out by him. It is this sense of his personal communion with the world teeming with sensations, in which we are in a brief sojourn, that leaves an indelible impression on us. The curved rocks, the sharp, spiky, thorny foliage of the watchful trees, uneven patches of grass tufts, are playfully orchestrated to differentiate a rural from an urban scene. They are animated by the soft footfall and gracious, benign presence of Ganesh. This feeling of intimacy is unlike the descriptive, decorative, hieratic, geometric repertoire of Gond, Madhubani or Warli art, which banishes the personal gaze of an individual artist. And yet, the personal journey of Ganesh through this transient station on earth acquires the impersonal accents of a deep, meditative, pantheistic devotion. In his music as in his art, he is in loving companionship of Lord Krishna, at once intensely personal, and, yet in tune with the infinite.
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