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I participated in a volunteer-ship program at a child empowering organization, Kyampisi Childcare Ministries, village Kyampisi, Uganda. I lived in town Kampala for the entire period and collected through drawing and writing information from all these places that my mind registered as new. Whatever I learnt about the functioning of life in general, about the countries Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, about the life of the people living in these countries and my own self became intense enough that I started to conceptualize a book of this knowledge by skimming through almost four hundred drawings (mostly portraits) and around hundred pieces of texts /diary entries that I had made during the stay. he minor cultural diversity provided me with the niche to think about the questions underlying the making of this book and to think about the aspect of representation.

continuation of process

No one wants to give him company or be close to him. Anyone who passes next to him,he wants to catch them, wants to hold them by grabbing their hands. He might look the most scarred, the most torn tattered clothing which will e wet with his saliva and stained with his blood. Smell of shit, disease, sounds and continuous abnormal movements and gestures. There is no rhythm, no harmony, no proper functioning of his brain,eyes, nerves thus movement of hands and legs, the skin at the elbows are scooped out.

These pictures belong to an intervention that contested how the body is disciplined within the wdka. It was an action that disrupted the usual movement related to eating within the academy, highlighted the aspect of exchanges over food,reclaimed the spaces that are rarely used for such an interaction.

Images from the mid-term presentation made. these images are from the previous project done.

Before I could attempt to do this formulation, I stepped in the challenging dimension of settling- unsettling the identities involved in the situation. First is my own identity as a person of Indian origin who spends five months in another country to understand from her own perspective the life and the priorities of the patch of people she comes across in an unknown land. Second is to make, as a student in a Western Academy, a commentary about this experience through the methods of the Western canon itself whose conceptual framework is laid on chronological categorization or labelling
mainly the ‘isms’ which is starkly different from the Ugandan ways of being (Heemst 2019). Its character is also a contrast to the approach of synthesis, of seeing the influence of philosophy on common life and how it could lead one to obtain true freedom (Hiriyanna 1). The latter resonates with the Indian quest on ontology and given my civilizational memories I tend to borrow more from it in dealing with reality.

The need to be informed of and invoke, in the Western society, the politics of the identities stems from the west’s own spot in the history of colonization which cannot be shrouded in its contemporary repercussions. Apparent in almost every field of the region’s academia is the tenuous discussion of power play. And I am almost impelled when I bring the documentation of people who are ‘significantly different’ from me to the table of a Western institute, to dip my research in waters that have neither Indian nor Ugandan properties (Hall 225). A possible reason could be the degree to which ethnographic / anthropological disciplines have become contested in where I want to talk about my stay in Uganda. This contestation has a concomitant – what cultural theorist Stuart Hall will phrase as the ‘over-simplified binary of the Black/White’ (235). It becomes inescapable for the Westerners to see my relation to this project as a person of different origin documenting one extreme of the binary to present it where the other extreme is in majority. In the setting I find myself in, the former and latter have long defined each other in relation to one being the reference for the other.

To stay truthful to the spirit with which I did this project, I choose to diverge from the social, political meaning of this ‘otherness’ for even if Ugandans have faced colonization and embody the reverberations of it till day, according to my empirical experience, they seem to dwell not in the critique of the foreigner other (Hall 234). The ways in which they define their society come across to be different. Also, in the process of unlearning the alienated education I received since childhood and digging up the schools of thought indigenous to the Indian land, I learnt to look at the politics of bodily difference as secondary to the sublime emotions of a human interaction and the pure consciousness that lies undifferentiated at the core of our existence.

A zine made on the term 'knowledge'.In the assignment to make an embodied publication we classmates started to hover until we settled around common themes of interest/ or possible research. Five of us Vijanti, Pontus, Daan, Anniek and Divyangi saw our tallying interests but found it difficult to name in one word what in content and approach was tacit/ obvious. Having gone through ‘history’, ‘power’, ‘education’, ‘revelation’, ‘wisdom’ we bargained at the threshold/gateway of the term knowledge. Knowledge in the sense that helps one shatter the clouds of ignorance, that helps one be better informed of the interplay of time, space and its inescapable effect on our lives. All this to get an insight into what we are in the world and how we relate to it. In this sense knowledge becomes a tool to attain awareness while this awareness can be synonymous with knowledge. Thus knowledge becomes both a method and an end in itself. The manifestations of a thing collapse into its pure nature that existed originally.

However, defining the content of its untouched form is difficult since definition of something takes as a pre-requisite the singularity of the subject performing the task. Our aim is to gather multiple singularities to be able to get a wider /comprehensive view on the topic under consideration- knowledge. We started with the simple exercise of asking the people in and around the place of our study about what their meaning of the word ‘knowledge’ is. The answers obtained were of such starkly different outlook that creating an exercise where we (five of the group) as well as our audience could travel through these informative crests and troughs in a playful way became important. knowledge.