Rukmini Swaminathan

Rukmini Swaminathan is pursuing her Master’s in Arts and Aesthetics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has interned with non-profit organisations in Delhi and Pondicherry, worked with filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj, taught at the Rural Education Centre of the Rishi Valley School and has also been research assistant to scholar and dancer Gayathri Iyer on her ongoing IFA-supported project that explores the life and times of a 19th-century devadasi named Venkata Sundara Sani. She is currently based in Bangalore. This grant enables Rukmini to create an online soundscape of the city drawn from journeys undertaken on the route of the No 201 series of buses in Bangalore.

In the proposal, Rukmini gives us a sensory evocation of the bus journeys she undertook in Bangalore as a young girl. Her ‘initiation’ into the world of the bus in Bangalore began when she was 10, with the No 201 series of buses. The No 201G bus went all the way from Jeevan Bhima Nagar to Banashankari, and Rukmini, along with her mother took this bus regularly to go to her flute classes in Padmanabhanagar. As the bus moved from Jeevan Bhima Nagar through Indiranagar, Koramangala, Madivala, Jayanagar and J P Nagar, the visuals and sounds of the city would also move, giving a sense of the city’s changing persona through these various lanes and localities.

Juxtaposed with this memory is her experience of the city during the complete lockdown earlier this year due to the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic. She could not take the buses anymore and there was an eerie, almost disorienting silence about the city. She cites Jacques Ranciere’s phrase, ‘being together apart’ as an apt description of these times and of bus journeys. The bus, as she sees it, ‘is like an organism that expands and contracts as it passes through the bus stops on its checklist. I know nothing about the people I share the No 201 buses with, except for the fact that we are together for a short while and yet apart in our journeys. It’s the movement of these people in a specific route that makes my bus ride so special’, she says.

Enabled by this grant, Rukmini will undertake many trips on the No 201 series buses and will record the soundscapes of the east and south of Bangalore. Does one part of the city sound different from the other? Who are the people in these No 201 buses? Where are they going? What languages do they speak? These are some of the questions he will ask. This project aims to narrate her personal story that is shared with many other stories of the people she does not know, and yet share these journeys with. The soundscapes of these journeys break the barrier of the unknown, ‘connecting strangers together and (connecting) the familiar and unfamiliar’, according to Rukmini.

The project has a two-pronged exploration – one of the ‘personal’ and the other of the ‘shared’. Rukmini plans to undertake about 25 trips on the different buses of the No 201 series. On each of these trips, she will audio record on her phone the entire journey in order to feel the duration of the journey and the soundscapes as the landscapes change within the city. She will journal her thoughts and impressions of all that she listens to and feels on these trips. By the end of the project, the journal will have different chapters that are dedicated to the various routes of the No 201 series of buses.

These audio recordings will be compiled and edited. To these songs that are played on the bus either by drivers or passengers will be added and a ‘bus album’ will be created. The audio files will range from about 20 to 60 mins each. Rukmini will curate these audio pieces based on what she feels is a distinctive sound of that route. Further, by creating thus bus album she would also question what we define as soothing music versus noise. The album will be uploaded on Spotify and Soundcloud.

In addition to this, Rukmini will chalk out the routes of the No 201 buses on google maps. A layer of sound will be added to the map. The bus routes will be compressed and the spectator will be able to click on the route and get a quick experience of the journey through the recorded sounds. All these maps will be compiled and put together on a website that will be accessible to everyone. The idea is to make maps come alive and have a bit of the city, its people and movement embedded within it through sound. Excerpts from her journal entries will add a layer of text to the embedded sounds.

Rukmini’s deliverables to IFA will be audio recordings of the bus journeys, the curated bus album of soundscapes and songs played in the bus, the maps of the routes of the bus with embedded sound maps and texts, a copy of the journal, and the website downloaded on a drive.