Art Will Out

Like James Cas­tle, Nek Chand made art with what he found — and he made his “out­sider” art out­side.  In The Secret King­dom:  Nek Chand, a Chang­ing India, and a Hid­den World of Art (Can­dlewick Press, 2018) by Bar­bara Rosen­stock with illus­tra­tions by Claire A. Nivola, we learn about Nek’s child­hood in the Pun­jab region of colo­nial India. “In the tiny vil­lage, Nek played and plant­ed, laughed and lis­tened, as the sto­ries cir­cled with the sea­sons, begin­ning to end and back again.” While they farmed, Nek’s father told sto­ries of wise kings. His moth­er told of grace­ful god­dess­es. Dur­ing the mon­soon sea­son his sis­ters told of mag­i­cal geese, and while the fam­i­ly har­vest­ed kanak Nek’s broth­ers told sto­ries of fierce jack­als and chat­ter­ing mon­keys. His head over­flow­ing with sto­ries, Nek made his own world on the banks of the vil­lage stream out of silt and clay and sticks and rocks. 

When Nek was grown, “the men with the guns came,” and colo­nial India was par­ti­tioned into two coun­tries, Pak­istan and India, based on reli­gion. Because Nek’s fam­i­ly was Hin­du liv­ing in now-Mus­lim Pak­istan, they had to leave their home­land. “Nek car­ried only vil­lage sto­ries in his bro­ken heart.”

In Chandi­garh, a “sharp-edged city of col­or­less con­crete” built on land where twen­ty-six vil­lages had been bull­dozed to make way for the new city, Nek found work as a gov­ern­ment road inspec­tor. But he won­dered, “Where were the curv­ing paths and flow­ing streams? Where were the singing men, the sway­ing women?  Where were the sto­ries?” When he dis­cov­ered acres of unoc­cu­pied scrub­land on the city’s edge, Nek began trans­form­ing the hid­den wilder­ness. He cleared land, built a mud hut, and began to gath­er up bits and bro­ken pieces of dis­card­ed trash along the roads. He car­ried them to his hid­den wilder­ness and in time he began to build his secret king­dom with con­crete and shards of cracked sinks and pots and bro­ken glass ban­gles. He replant­ed and tend­ed half-dead plants from the city dump. He cov­ered frames of twist­ed bikes and rusty pipes with con­crete, “sculpt­ed packs of jack­als, troops of mon­keys, and flocks of geese. Begin­ning to end and back again, Nek found each group a place to belong, until he belonged too — king of a hid­den land of stories.” 

For fif­teen years his king­dom stayed secret, but when a gov­ern­ment crew clear­ing land dis­cov­ered his ille­gal build­ing and report­ed him, offi­cials decid­ed to clear his land.

“Until the peo­ple of Chandi­garh came.” 

They came to see this mag­i­cal world, gave mon­ey and tools to help save it, col­lect­ed scraps to recy­cle, and con­vinced gov­ern­ment offi­cials to let Nek Chand stay “in the place he belonged.” Now peo­ple from all over the world vis­it Nek Chand’s no-longer-secret king­dom to mar­vel at the cre­ation he nev­er stopped build­ing, a place that “tells the sto­ries peo­ple need to hear…stories of com­ing home. “

 A dou­ble gate fold spread reveals pho­tos of Nek Chand’s secret king­dom, and back mat­ter tells us more about how, with noth­ing more than cast-off mate­ri­als, his mem­o­ries and sto­ries, and a long­ing for home Nek Chand cre­at­ed a gift of art and yearn­ing for us all. 

In an inter­view Rosen­stock told how she was seized by the idea of writ­ing about Nek Chand while work­ing on anoth­er pic­ture book biog­ra­phy that at the time “was going nowhere.  I was bored. I was frus­trat­ed… I sat in my office search­ing ran­dom things on my lap­top, and acci­den­tal­ly googled some­thing like, ‘artists work­ing out­side’. Boom! There was a pic­ture of a water­fall with odd­ly cool stat­ues in front of it….” Cap­ti­vat­ed by Nek Chand’s art, Rosen­stock tem­porar­i­ly set aside the book she was work­ing on to write Chand’s sto­ry. Books, Rosen­stock tells us, are born of passion.