Saur (Tehri)
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Youth use art to check migration from hills
Saur (Tehri)
In a corner of Saur village in Tehri district stands a row of tiny mud cottages with crumbling walls and broken roofs. No one has lived here in years. The houses, over 50 in number and abandoned for over a decade or so, count only wild animals as occasional dwellers. Migration, which is emptying village after village in Uttarakhand, has swept over Saur, too, leaving in its wake only ghosts and spirits.
But in the past few weeks, a colourful revolution has spread in this eerily quiet village. The once-brown, forlorn walls of the houses here have been splashed with colour and the windows are now a dash of eclectic red and blue. In a unique initiative named the Wise Wall Project that aims to draw attention to the problem of migration that the hills are grappling with, a bunch of volunteers led by 25-year-old Deepak Ramola have been painting walls of houses in Saur using Garhwal and Mughal art forms. Almost 110 youngsters armed with paintbrushes and cans have spent a month giving an artistic lease of life to the houses here.
Talking to TOI, Ramola said, “While growing up, whenever I visited my grandmother's house, I saw families leaving for better opportunities. So many villages lie abandoned across Uttarakhand. Through the Wise Wall Project, we are documenting and painting life lessons on walls of abandoned houses, hoping to bring back people the villages lost.“
According to the 2011 census, there are 1,048 ghost villages in 13 districts of the Himalayan state. Saur may also be on the verge of becoming a ghost village, with only 12 families living in it now. The region once boasted of a bustling population of nearly 200 families.
Poornima Sukumar, head artist of the project, said, “Our endeavour is to celebrate the village wisdom through art. We have used the Garhwal school of painting, miniature Mughal art to bring home our point.“
