Suspended in the Forest

Thee of Life File ak the art’in the heart o if the Himalayas; discovers Shikha Tripathi

- Shikha Tripathi

Cocooned in a dense deodar forest that looks the Dhauladhar range in the eye and suspended high on a ridge with the expanse of the Beas valley down below, an uncanny spaceship in the quieter part of Himachal Pradesh welcomes you into its fold. As you enter, you may feel you have landed on the sets of a science fiction film, albeit in the midst of an alpine landscape marked with traditional mountain homes. For all the conventions that surround it, the Tree of Life Eila deviates from the norm with all its might.

Created painstakingly over a decade by Rama Shankar and Palak Singh, an art-curating father-daughter duo from central India, this is a space that defies the textbook definition of an arts centre in every sense. Standing tall in Naggar, an elfin mountain settlement known for its association with Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, Eila is a concept that takes the town’s fine art heritage forward without losing its own unique expression. The space is both a platform for local and contemporary art and an accommodation that allows art lovers to indulge in the atmospheric place, especially in its rooms that give the illusion of floating in an interstellar world.

SPACED OUT