Jute Drying

Eastern India · street

Bundles of harvested jute fibre stand in tepees across a field, the stalks fanned out at the top to catch the sun. The bank of a quiet stream runs across the back.

Jute is one of the older crops of eastern India and Bangladesh — the long, fibrous stems are cut, soaked in water for a couple of weeks until the soft tissue separates from the fibre, and then dried in these distinctive tepees in the fields where they grew. The drying tepees stay up for weeks. From a passing road they look almost ceremonial, like rows of small thatched shrines, evenly spaced and slightly leaning.

This particular field ran down to a low stream lined with trees, and the tepees stretched away from the camera in a loose grid. Most of the work — cutting, retting, lifting — had been done a few days earlier. Now it was just a question of waiting for the wind and the sun to finish the job. I framed the picture so the tepees filled the bottom two-thirds and the trees made a horizon. There is a quality to Indian agricultural land that gets photographed often but rarely well. The trick is to let the work be the subject without staging it. The jute is just doing what jute does.

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