Landscapes of La Mancha and Punjab

The second public workshop of Baba Quijote Singh, titled Landscapes of La Mancha and Punjab, took place on 29 August 2026 at Instituto Cervantes New Delhi. Following the first workshop, Quijote Meets the Qissa, which explored the literary and philosophical connections between Don Quijote and Punjabi traditions, this session shifted the project's focus from writing and textual adaptation towards visual storytelling, image-making and multimedia.

The workshop began with a warm-up and a brief recap of the ideas developed during the first session. Participants returned to the central premise of Baba Quijote Singh: the possibility of placing Cervantes' Don Quijote in conversation with Punjab, not simply by relocating the story geographically, but by allowing its characters, objects, landscapes and ideas to acquire new meanings within a Punjabi context.

A key starting point for the workshop was the question: What happens when the same thing appears differently to different people? Can two things be true at once? The famous windmill episode from Don Quijote provided a particularly useful entry point. To Don Quijote, the windmills are giants; to Sancho Panza, they are windmills. The workshop also considered the episode of the barber's basin, which Don Quijote interprets as the legendary Helmet of Mambrino. These moments demonstrate one of the central characteristics of Cervantes' novel: the tension between an object as it physically exists and the meanings that characters project onto it.

This became a way of thinking about visual adaptation. Participants were encouraged to consider that adapting a scene visually does not necessarily mean illustrating the words on the page. Instead, an adaptation can reinterpret the information, relationships and ideas contained within a scene. A windmill, for example, might not need to become a literal Punjabi equivalent. The question could instead be what object in a Punjabi landscape might perform a similar dramatic or symbolic function, or what happens when the original Spanish object and its Punjabi counterpart are allowed to exist together.

The workshop then introduced participants to the idea of the visual frame and the amount of information that can be communicated through an image before a character speaks or a text is read. Participants considered how setting, time of day, landscape, objects, costume, character, gesture, composition and point of view can establish a world and communicate information to an audience. The emphasis was on learning to look closely and to recognise that visual choices are also narrative choices. The placement of an object, the scale of a character, the amount of empty space in an image or the relationship between two visual elements can alter how an audience understands a scene.

Participants were subsequently divided into groups and given individual pages containing scenes from Don Quijote. Each group was asked to analyse its assigned passage before considering how it might be transformed into a visual adaptation. Rather than beginning with an image, the groups first broke the written material down into its essential components. They identified the setting and landscape, the significant objects, the characters and their emotional states, the costumes, the most important dialogue and the central theme or argument of the scene.

The groups were asked to select only three lines of text from their scenes. This constraint encouraged them to consider which information genuinely needed to remain verbal and which could instead be communicated visually. They also considered how each element might change when transferred from Cervantes' Spain to the Punjab of Baba Quijote Singh. A landscape, object or piece of costume could be retained, transformed, substituted or placed in dialogue with something from Punjab.

To deepen this process, the groups were introduced to Stanislavski's questions as a tool for understanding the dramatic circumstances of their scenes. Questions such as who the character is, where and when they are, what they want, what stands in their way and what they do to achieve their objective helped participants move beyond simply identifying what was present in the text. The exercise encouraged them to think about the action taking place underneath the description and, consequently, about what an audience would need to see in order to understand that action without relying entirely on words.

The workshop then moved from analysis into visual experimentation. Tables were filled with photographs and printed materials representing both La Mancha and Punjab, alongside fragments of text, poetry, coloured paper, photographs of people and objects, and other materials that could be cut, rearranged and combined. Participants used these materials to construct visual storyboards for their assigned scenes.

The collage exercise deliberately placed the two worlds of Spain and Punjab alongside one another. Rather than attempting to create a seamless or historically accurate representation of either place, participants were encouraged to explore contrast, juxtaposition and unexpected connections. A photograph of a Spanish landscape could sit beside a Punjabi road; a windmill could appear alongside a tube well; a contemporary object could enter a scene from Cervantes; and a fragment of poetry or dialogue could become part of the visual composition.

Working physically with paper, scissors and found images made the process of visual storytelling immediate and exploratory. Participants could change the scale of an object, remove an image, obscure part of a landscape or move a character into an entirely different environment. As the collages developed, they became less like illustrations of the original text and more like visual interpretations of it.

The groups also experimented with creating short paper-based animation fragments from their materials. By moving individual elements or changing the composition from one frame to another, participants began to explore how movement and transformation could be created without conventional animation techniques. This exercise connected directly to the multimedia ambitions of Baba Quijote Singh, where projected imagery, physical performance, sound and installation will interact to create the world of the production.

An important part of the final sharing was the decision to allow the visual material to speak before its creators explained it. Groups presented their scenes and the other participants were asked to interpret what they were seeing. They considered what they believed was happening, what they thought the scene was about and which visual details had led them to that interpretation.

This created a useful comparison between literary and visual storytelling. A written scene can provide extensive information through narration and dialogue, while a visual scene requires the audience to construct relationships between what they see. The same image can therefore produce multiple readings depending on what the viewer notices, what they bring to it and how the elements have been arranged.

The workshop concluded with participants creating and presenting their completed collages based on their scene adaptations. These collages brought together the different strands of the day's work: Cervantes and Punjab, text and image, La Mancha and Punjabi landscapes, the literal and the imagined. They demonstrated how a scene from Don Quijote could be transformed without losing its underlying dramatic or thematic questions.

For Baba Quijote Singh, the workshop was another step in developing a visual language for the production. The material created by participants will continue to inform the project's evolving relationship between text, image, projection and installation as it moves towards its premiere in December 2026.

Landscapes of La Mancha and Punjab therefore extended the project's central question into a new medium. If the first workshop asked what happens when Quijote's story is imagined through the literary traditions of Punjab, the second asked what happens when that imagined world is made visible. Through observation, analysis, collage and play, participants began to build a visual landscape in which La Mancha and Punjab could exist not as separate worlds, but as two ways of seeing the same story.