Official archives are often pedestalised as the only and accepted means record preservation. But such pedestalisation overlooks the fact that an archive is nothing more than a collection of choice as directed by the administration and political dispensation of the time who decide what should be preserved and what should not.

Preservation is part of memory, however, documentary photography empowers us to unfold what political dispensation of a time often wants to be concealed. Its power to hold those in power accountable and make the viewer angry or uncomfortable with the extent to which s/he has normalised the wrongs of the system. Such discomfort is also located in the social hierarchy and could often hit the very metanarrative of greatness many have nurtured and socialised themselves into since childhood. Documentary photography can hence be seen as an archival act which undoes such so-called claims of being great, an act that dislodges the imaginative realms of art practices.

Take the instance of Abhijeet Gurjar, an Indian freelance photographer based out of the South Western town of Kolhapur. He pursued a degree in Mechanical Engineering but changed course midway in 2006 to pursue a Mass Communication & Journalism education instead. For the past two years, he has focused on his project ‘Efforts for Prisoners’ Rehabilitation,’ for which he chose Kolhapur Central Jail as his worksite. Prisoners’ rehabilitation is a completely different sector where the stigma of crime gets stuck to an inmate for life. Abhijit is highly engaged with this subject. Meticulously capturing life in the jail premises, he has been able to bring out the reality of the ecosystem which is very removed from the world as we know it.

Images of a letter being read by prisoners humanises them and reveal a narrative of family life. This is especially evident when children come visiting without any judgement to meet their prisoner-relatives. A tent erected on the jail premises by the authorities works like a neutral space of comfort. The prisoners wait to sit under the tent canopy with relatives. Gurjar’s images reveal various psychological facets of the prisoners and their families. Some young children cannot help playing on the premises. From under the table, Gurjar’s camera lens captures the children playing around it. Even in what seems like lighter pictures, anxiety is a constant undercurrent. For e.g., While an image shows prisoners awaiting their family or having lunch together for what might seem like a routine meeting, but within that image, the unseen prison authority manifests as an attempt to underline to prisoners their familial roots and ties. It is a way of reinforcing that they have to find a way of making it right to return to their family members. Though subtle, the powerplay in these images is hard to ignore. From another statistic or a prisoner who answers to a roll call, they become human beings living like you and me on hope… longing to return to everyday life beyond incarceration. The liberal space of a tent created within the confine of a prison, however temporary, stands as a metaphor and as a sign of hope for the inmate to hold on to. Gurjar’s camera reads into this subtext of the situation and through the grammar of photography decodes it for us.

Taha Ahmad, from Lucknow in India’s northern province of Uttar Pradesh, has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Arts. Since photography is an integral part of the discipline, it is natural for many to work eventually get interested in photography. However, many confine their skill in advertising/model/product photography. Taha moved away from such regular ghettoised process and attempted to photograph a hardly known community. Banaras is known for its handloom heritage for ages. The weaver communities in Banaras and Lucknow have both Hindus and Muslims among them. After Lucknow emerged as a city of the aristocrats in the medieval era many of these weavers found patrons among royalty. Though the chikankari embroidery which has made a name for itself on the global fashion map is better known, it is the lesser-known ‘Mukaish Badla’ embroidery (a form of embroidery where metallic spangled threads are used to weave the design on the cloth, in a step that follows after the chikanlari work and demands considerable precision) that requires absolute finesse. The smallest mistake can tear the fabric and ruin the entire outfit. Given the few artisans who can accomplish this, it is rather exclusive. Ahmad spent time with these artisans and developed a really close rapport with them. His photographs documenting the craft of these gifted men and women has opened up their world to outsiders. Filling up the entire surface with a brocade of tinsel metallic (even gold plated silver!) threads meant for weaving and embroidery is a tedious back-breaking process and Ahmad’’s images capture the artisans navigating the toughest bits.

From the heydays of aristocratic patronage to the tedium of catering to today’s fickle minded buyers the past and present are enmeshed in their lives just like the embellishment is on the fabric they work on. This interplay of the past and present is an important area of exploration in Ahmad’s photographs. And though his work is current, he unfailingly gives it a juxtapository feel with a throwback to the nostalgia of a lost heritage.

His photographs capture the pain of these legatees of India’s dying weaving heritage who can’t make enough to pull themselves out of poverty despite working ten-hour shifts in a day, sitting hunched over the stretched out with tinsel thread working with needles furiously to keep up with impossible deadlines. Their abodes are the still the Havelis of the Nawabi era which are reduced to old crumbling buildings. The backdrop these old edifices form in Ahmad’s camera frame tells its own story of regret and a sense of loss along with talking of the artisans’ life and craft. Fleetingly the sight of little girls playing hopscotch in the inner courtyard, in traditional outfits their scarves covering their heads contrasts with the exterior of these buildings where pollution, noise, filth and squalor on the street outside cruelly remind one of the dire circumstances these artisans deal with daily.

In terms of employment share, India’s unorganised sector employs 83% of the workforce while a mere 17% in the organised sector. Over 92.4% of India’s workforce is informal (with no written contract, paid leave and other benefits). Besides, there are also 9.8% of informal workers even in the organised sectors indicating the level of outsourcing. No surprises then that India’s informal sector is the nation’s most significant contributory factor in the growth. And yet these overworked, underpaid workers who work in the most challenging and often unsafe conditions live in abject poverty and are the most neglected in India’s urban landscape. Their issues rarely find (adequate) articulation or representation at the country’s high tables of welfare, police or planning. Taniya Sarkar’s camera keeps its focus on these workers and their lives.

This independent Indian photographer based in the Eastern metropolis of Kolkata is a Journalism & Mass Communication post-graduate from the University of Kolkata. Within her focus on the labour in the informal sector, her photography also takes a gendered view highlighting how 94% of the women’s workforce is in the unorganised sector. These women who are helping out food on the table for the family often have to face multiple challenges like sexual harassment, gender discrimination, lower pay and even the worst kind of casteism.

Sarkar’s practice includes photographing objects used and the actual labour bodies. Her mode of capturing women labourers is that of ‘life paintings, which comes from an art school tradition. They often face angular haze and posture that allows the photographer to adjust the frame to capture the nature of appearance as well as labour work they are involved with. A perennial fear of uncertainties looms large with such people and Tanya attempts to explore such uncertainties through her ‘life paintings.’

Urban viewers, might not find her images “beautiful.” But she intends to represent naturalism coming from hard labour and living in poverty and not physical beauty. The images captured in still-life redraw aspirations reflected through photo-images. These are not only a repository of memories but of a life of aspirations, to move forward and sail through hardships. The current pandemic has killed such aspirations with impositions of restrictions without any alternate mechanisms. This is state-sponsored political violence of a kind which abjures basic values of humanity. The solidity in all of Sarkar’s images draws viewer’s attention to the fact that physicality is not all about sensuous bodies but about hard work and living with hard labour in the informal sector which does not get any recognition in the annals of labour.

Sunder Solanki’s photo images constitute the recent events that shook the Indian capital city of Delhi. Just like the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in the aftermath of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, this was also well-orchestrated. The 21st century has seen Delhi witness a spate of riots. The violence unleashed in these riots is rooted in hate, anger and a sense of contempt for each other. Due to not having any adherence to fraternity and lack of shared aspirations, riots become an easy means to annihilate communities. The official archive of riots is confined to the FIRs, investigation files and chronology of events – each coloured with biases. These then become contested archival documents. Such contestation is kept alive by those affected by the rioting and a narrative of hate is kept alive with it. Over time, even if the event itself does find archival mention it, such contestations are firmly kept out of the archival process.

When Solanki’s camera enters affected houses and localities, his images change this narrative with their impact that shakes the viewer’s sense of humanity. The precision of the momentary process does not become a concern but at best is left to the image itself, as there is no time to redress the captured mood and anguish. Image after image of the poor who lost their dear ones tells you tales of hate, bigotry, terror, pillage, destruction, arson, and hateful graffiti among charred walls which were witness to the hate and violence unleashed while the authorities either looked away or often actually colluded or indulged in the excesses. All Indian riots see maximum deaths from Dalit communities – irrespective of their religious affiliations.

Hope and despair are intertwined in Solanki’s images. Even access to medical treatment becomes difficult in such times of systemic collapse. Some disturbing images show people removing stitches on their own, risking infections and other problems. Even after more than seven decades of Independence, India’s claims of being a modern republic… a welfare state invested in its marginalised then sound hollow and become hugely contested.

Arun Vijai’s works unpack the nature of the casteism in a society where stigma becomes a professional marker. Arun’s images of the mortuary and autopsy rooms are brutal and very scary. It is difficult for most Indians to imagine a life centred around the dead. Yet it is these Dalits who perform post-mortems. Ideally only a qualified doctor is supposed to dissect a human body. But Dalit conservancy workers are forced into this job and they are not even given the professional equipment like surgical blades needed for the job. They often use age-old tools which are not used in several parts of the world even on dead animals. Their living and working conditions dehumanise them daily. Images of empty liquor bottles are a testimony to how they have to drink themselves into a numb inebriation to cut open dead bodies with rusty old butcher knives. Dirt and disgust hang heavy in the air in and around postmortem rooms where medical ethics are all but forgotten. With authorities looking the other way medical ethics boards seem to have lost all courage to ban such practices.

Avani Rai comes from a family of photographers. She made a documentary on her father, one of India’s most celebrated photographers, Raghu Rai. Though she owns his photo archives and has imbibed several of his skills her work shows how she ensures her practice stands out for being different.

What transpired between 2-3rd December 1984 in the central Indian town of Bhopal is the world’s worst industrial disaster. Over 5,00,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas which escaped from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant, killing over 8,000 within two weeks, and another 8,000 plus have died from exposure to the methyl isocyanate gas.

While the cause of the disaster continues to be hotly debated such debates generally focus on technicalities like sabotage or technical error. The narratives presented even in the courts of land where pitched legal battles continue, rarely look at this from the point of view of mass suffering. The legend Raghu Rai had captured these tragic events risking his life. Avani seems to take a cue from her father and moves further to articulate life of the families affected by the disaster. While Raghu Rai’s work recalls biases in the rehabilitation process, Avani evidences the phenomenon through her images. She constantly follows the victims’ lives and tracks them through photo images. The present site of the chemical factory, life of affected children, state of the families, their resolve to move forward are important events in the life of the affected. The inhuman nature of privatised capitalism and its resultant discourse is a glaring reality of the present world. Rehabilitation work by those at the helm of affairs leaves a lot to be desired. Reduced by the system to a statistic the affected are still struggling to piece their lives together from this living nightmare. Avani ensures her images go beyond the apparent and frames the lives of the victims in the harsh realities of their everyday world. Avani strikes a balance in her subjective position by choosing two families of different religious groups and brings out the tension they continue to live in 36 years after the avoidable disaster.

Sabaritha is from Tamil Nadu has pursued her education in professional social work. This became a turning point in her life as she came to realise social realities and has dedicated her life to social issues. The pedagogic structure of social work is driven by the Gandhian syndrome where most intervention is top-down. Sabathia’s images are centred on the theme of women in the contemporary worldwide web. The Internet has emerged as a powerful medium but it depends on digital access. Nevertheless, its reach is increasing and has become important in urban spaces. Her work exposes the vulnerability of women’s bodies in the digital world. She uses light and darkness to make the images effective to signify their traumatised existence. Sexual exploitation of the women’s body, abuses, forced desires and unwelcome attention are some aspects of her work that get reflected through her body of the work. Figures are framed in multiple manners with an emphasis in every frame to convey graded gender inequality. Her work recalls the abuses and language of sexual desire hurled at her and finds a commonality with the deep psychological wounds inflicted on every Indian woman. Her works are a reminder of how women are treated as objects of desire and not a human being. Every image frame is highly contextualised to convey a narrative of sexual abuse and exploitation.

Shankar’s photography practices have an immense personal touch. Coming from a vulnerable social background himself, he observes life as it happens and as it gets going which he attempts to unfold through various aspects of visual literacy. The personal is omnipresent in each of Shankar’s frames. His images are repository that bears their own narrative. His mother was trafficked to the red light area and Shankar along with his grandmother managed to trace her in the city of Kolkata. He revisits his past with the camera lens and photographs the locations documenting the dingy living conditions of sex workers. Shankar spent his childhood in those areas; it was home. He captures its architectonic dinginess. Both the interior and the exterior has a mark of his narrative. Since his mother was part of the red light community, Shankar’s camera frame is not aimed to shoot an image to create any sensuous appeal. Instead, he prefers to project the existential appearance of the localities and people with whom he grew and spent his childhood. Shankar’s images include villages, localities of the common and the rural landscapes. It is interesting to observe that his quest is to capture an image that will have a narrative of its own. The village is not romanticised at all in his photography practices.

M Palanikumar is based out of the South Indian metropolis of Chennai. He has involved himself in documenting sanitary workers. His images during Covid pandemic are a repository of the functioning of urban biases. Cleaning becomes the sole responsibility of Dalits. Palanikumar enters in the areas of urbanscape to capture the otherwise unseen. So much so that the civic administration itself seems to work really hard at invisibilising them. The exterior becomes a prime concern where he constructs his images to capture the life of sanitary workers who despite their often dangerous work are left out of the narrative of Corona-warriors. His camera trains its lens on how these sanitary workers sanitise areas, sitting in between to have their food surrounded by squalour and filth. The official archive will never include these narratives of their contribution during the pandemic. Forcibly made to dispose off waste manually, it is as if their very lives are being equated with that waste by the system which not only dehumanises without solace but does not even pay them commensurate to the dangers they are exposed while undertaking relentless back-breaking work. Given that labour in India is hierarchical, they do not become part of any national aspirations. This situation of disgust is a cruel reminder to every citizen of the Republic of India on how their psychotic perversion haunts others and reduces them to a sub-human existence.

Randeep Moddake is from Punjab. He has been documenting atrocities on the Dalits in Punjab. Often economic deprivation is used to rationalise atrocities in rural areas. However though Punjab is economically prosperous and Dalits are landholders, atrocities have not stopped. Its manifestations is very violent. Moddake has documented the families who faced violence from the dominant Jats. The identity of being Sikh, or teachings of Guru Nanakji appears to be cosmetic and adherence to the Brahmanical social values by the Jat Sikhs has become the order of the day. His portrait images are very simple, no commotions in the frame, no ambiguity to unpack the threats of violence and existence. In recent works, he has captured landless agricultural labours in Punjab during the pandemic has devastated many. The landless labourers are among the worst-hit. Their survival is dependent on others in the village, especially the ‘upper-caste’ landlords.

Moddake attempts to map the life of the labour in the semblance of the rural settings, and the agricultural fields. Interestingly both oppressor and oppressed are native Punjabis and not migrants. But the plight of Punjab’s Dalits underscores rural India’s profound caste divide. Though it is obviously the greatest challenge in India and secularists, leftists, rightists and the intellectual class has failed to address this problem. In fact, the roots of the problem are often deliberately invisibilised. What gets addressed all the time is ‘protected ignorance.’

Prof. Y. S. Alone

School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi.

Presently he is working at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi from 8 th March 2007 onwards. Previously he worked at Dept. of Archaeology, Deccan College Post Graduate Research Institute (deemed university) Pune and at Dept of Fine Arts Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra.

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