Living Ladakh

Prabir Purkayastha's Ladakh is a love story with a difference.

Fourteen years ago almost to the day, shattered by the very public murder of Rajiv Gandhi and with an unexplained deathwish, an advertising executive escaped into the wilderness of Ladakh. And was forever lost.

Prabir Chandra Purkayastha was a Clarion hand who was working "in a crucible of brilliance" with Congressmen P Chidambaram, Pranab Mukherjee, Sam Pitroda, Madhavrao Scindia, Narsimha Rao and, of course, Gandhi himself, on the fortnightly newsletter Zero Hour when Rajiv Gandhi asked him to quit advertising and join the Congress.

"I bought khadi clothes," recalls Purkayastha, at 53 his lashes still limmed with tears, "but one sad day, everything ended."

Purkayastha turned into a psychomatic wreck. "I cracked up," he says simply. And so, in June 1991, he escaped to Ladakh "where nobody and nothing was recognisable", battered by his own, recent history, bent on joining the monastic order.

Alas, his hopes were dashed by a monk at the Hemis monastery who said that joining any monastic order in this cold, highland plateau required one of two pre-conditions: that you be Ladakhi (which Purkayastha decidedly was not), or carry a letter of permission from the Dalai Lama himself (which Purkayastha hadn't even considered).

But the monk softened the blow: "What you are seeking," he told the visitor, "the land will give you."

And by way of further encouragement, asked him to undertake a difficult trek to Rhizong monastery. "I did the trek though I almost died," recalls Purkayastha. "Figuratively, my earlier self did die. Physically, I was shattered by the brutality of that experience. All that was left was a spiritual carcass."

All of this could have been an ad-man's gobbledly-gook if it weren't for the fact that 14 years later Purkayastha is as hooked to Ladakh as the day on which he first set foot there. "Ladakh found me," he says, using terms of endearment men usually reserve for their mistresses.

For eight years, even as his advertising career soared, Purkayastha would return to Ladakh, hanging up his "grey, corporate warrior suit" to wander aimlessly across its vast wilderness.

Ten days, a fortnight; finding easy camraderie amidst the monks and the novices, the people and the soldiers; gaining acceptance into interior Ladakh thanks to the army welcoming him as a fauji son into their fold. "I wandered in a Sufi sense; did tapasya. I lived in villages and caves and monasteries, in nomadic huts and shacks and army messes."

The twist in the tale is another photographer, Prabuddha Das Gupta, whose book on Ladakh was recently out, and who first put a camera in Purkayastha's hands, telling him to get back images of the hinterlands in which he travelled.

For someone who had never considered photography and wasn't too enthused, it wasn't easy to be convinced of its merits. Till he started to take his first pictures of Ladakh. Then he was hooked.

Even so, Purkayastha is a strange animal. In those six years, he's experimented with cameras and films, and shot hundreds of rolls. But all he has ever photographed is Ladakh. There is no other image in his portfolio. And last year he quit a lucrative advertising career to make his pictures on Ladakh pay for his livelihood.

Already, he has a couple of highly successful exhibitions behind him, and has published calendars. And now he's done a book (Ladakh, Timeless Books, 184 pages; collector edition Rs 12,000, regular edition, Rs 9,000; both have a pre-launch Rs 3,000 off) that will be launched late next month, and is working on an exhibition in the US where panoramic images will be sold.

"I've had to master the art of photography as well as my survival skills at heights of 15,000 feet," he says. "I didn't want to be just another photographer, I wanted to be the best."

For this, he went to London to absorb the technology of photography, corresponded with NASA (on space photography), began experimenting with films (the results of those indulgences make evocative photographs in the book). Since his early research was into art, his early pictures too have the lyrical quality of watercolours.

Later, absorbed by the dynamism of black and white film, he began to use Efke and Kodak Techpan films (though he's an Ilford user for most part), to achieve results that are astounding.

"I shoot in winter at temperatures of -20 degree in blizzard conditions, so the light is dappled, and the wind knocks the snow off the rocks, leaving them exposed."

The book was born out of his 2002 exhibition when publisher Raavi Sabherwal first broached the idea. But work began on it only last year, and kept growing with the frequency of his trips increasing, and Tania Das Gupta who designed the book, matching his pace with her ability to experiment.

"The publisher gave us free rein," she says, thrilled with the reproduction that Pragati Offset, Hyderabad has achieved.

Purkayastha wanted the book to be "seamless" like Ladakh itself with no forseeable beginning or end, "no statement to be made", and without the images caged in by either text or captions. Scattered through the book, instead, are his own "thoughts" from a journal he'd kept on his treks.

"In the mists of sudden winter darkness I will think of you," he notes, for instance.

"In the sensuous silence of swirling snowflakes I will reach for you. In the freezing loneliness of sweeping snowstorms I'll dance for you... You are the last breath that I will breathe... You are the sound of warm laughter when all life ceases... And, if I could gather all the joys hidden in heaven I would give them all to you."

"The idea," he insists, "is to find Ladakh within yourself. It's a love story between a human entity and the land, a love story between a man and his god that is manifested through this land. That is the soul of this book."

Even so, Purkayastha's been selfish, sharing only bits of that soul. He hopes to be back in Ladakh, this time no longer the Sufi he'd set out to be amidst all the desolation, but with some very clear projects in mind.

"I want to work on the murals of Ladakh," he says; "I'm going to be doing a lot of close-ups of the land; I'm shooting the moon over Ladakh; and now I'm fascinated with photographing portraits of the people."

The monk in Hemis was right: the land has indeed claimed Purkayastha.