Pipe Smoking Ritual Chillum India Rajasthan 2

by Sue Jacobi

Title

Pipe Smoking Ritual Chillum India Rajasthan 2

Artist

Sue Jacobi

Medium

Photograph - Fine Art Photography - Digital Art

Description

Pipe Smoking Ritual Chillum India Rajasthan 2.
When I was travelling in Rajasthan, India, I was fascinated by a sight I saw several times. It was a pipe smoking community ritual. It involves a special pipe known as a chillum or chilam, which is filled with a flavoured tobacco called Zarda. Typically two men sit down, or rather squat side by side, and take their time to clean the pipe and fill the pipe with tobacco, and then the first deep puff is finally taken. Then the pipe is passed to the other (or next) man, and he takes a leisurely puff. Then it�s passed back, and so on. It was a fascinating sight, and I watched this calming ritual many a time. On one occasion an aged man, clad in his traditional Rajasthani outfit of dhoti and colourful turban, entered the village farmhouse where I was staying. He had probably heard of my visit (a stranger). There were already several neighbours there, and everyone as sitting outdoors as usual. Without a word, he quietly sat down on a cot that was placed in the courtyard where we sat. He then pulled out his chillum, lit it up from the choola cooking stove (made of mud) on which the food was cooking (outdoors of course), and proceeded to smoke it. Soon he was joined by one of the younger man for a few rounds of chillum. When the younger man retired from the chillum ritual, another one took his place, and so on. Our aged visiter was part of the chillum team throughout though. After about half an hour he took his leave. My friend in the Rajasthani village told me that chillum smoking is very popular among the aged men in Rajasthan. His own father is now middle-aged and smokes beedis, also known as bidis or biris (these are thin Indian cigarettes filled with tobacco flake and wrapped in a tendu or possibly even Piliostigma racemosum leaf tied with a string at one end). But when his father gets older, he will switch to chillum pipe smoking. I found that quite interesting. In this series of images, I have captured the entire gamut of actions ranging from getting in the mood, to pulling out and cleaning the pipe, filling the pipe, lighting the pipe, taking a deep puff and finally passing the pipe to the next person. I hope you enjoy this fascinating community ritual as much as I enjoyed watching it.
A chillum, or chilam, is a straight conical pipe with end-to-end channel, traditionally made of clay and used since at least the eighteenth century by wandering Hindu monks, known as sadhus in India. It was invented in India. The culture of owning and smoking in a chillum has spread from India to the rest of the world since the mid-1960s.
According to Alfred Dunhill, Africans have long employed chillum-style pipes for smoking cannabis and later tobacco. Gourds and various horns were often employed while conical bowls were common in Uganda. One of the more famous pipes is an ivory cone pipe once belonging to "Waganda" monarch King Mtesa.
More recently, it has also seen use in sacraments by Rastafarians.
Since the 1960s the embellished bamboo chillum has become an American folk art form. These pipes are handmade and often sold by the artists on street corners in places like the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and the Greenwich Village area of New York City. As designs these contemporary smoking pipes recall traditional decorated bamboo pipes from Borneo, however, the American carved bamboo design often employs a brass lighting fixture for a bowl. Since the 1970s, street artist Darrel "Pipeman" Mortimer of San Francisco has made nearly 10,000 such pipes, each signed, numbered and sold personally.
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Context : pipe, pipe smoking, mud pipe, chillum pipe, chilam pipe, Rajasthani village, travel photography, India photography, Rajasthani pipe, old men, traditional Rajasthani attire, Sue Jacobi, cleaning the pipe, filling the pipe, passing the pipe, taking a puff, deep puff, straw hut, cot, squatting, smoking ritual, community ritual, rural custom, exotic custom, chillum chilam India Rajasthan rural farmer agriculture field colorful sunshine warm hot sunny sun Sue Jacobi exotic vacation vignette grunge border frame textures turban pagari pagri pagadi pagdi dhoti kurta exhaling pastime squat

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February 28th, 2015

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