Post Colonialism and Parthiv Shah: A Revisit to ‘Figures, Facts, Feelings- a Direct Diasporic Dialogue’

(Parthiv Shah- Photography artist and alternative visual communication designer)

Post-colonialism and the discourses engendered by it were very much in the air throughout the 1990s exactly the way a flower market carries the mixed heaviness of multiple fragrances, together slowly turning into an objectionable smell or an abattoir where blood and the severed body parts of animals send out an aroma of abjection. The Empire was talking back; for a long time without even thinking whether the former masters were really listening to the retort. Those who listened to the rhetoric of anyone who spoke out the experiences of a post-colonial life absorbed them into the academic structures that they had been creating to accommodate such hurt sentiments. Speaking the post colonial experience from within the academic structures however lost its edge, rendering the post colonial subject who spoke out into someone who could enjoy the advantageous status of being a ‘special other’.

 (a work by Parthiv Shah)

The fad was very much in India during the 90s, especially among the producers of the visual cultures. The struggle of an Indian artist living in a decade that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence from the colonial rule, to articulate the post colonial existence was a painful one for many had already forgotten the colonial past and its place had been taken over by the new imperialistic thoughts and styles without much critical resistance. The post partition literature had already taken the path of a different discourse, often overstepping the academic strictures of the post colonial studies and which has been successfully continuing till date. Films, both the mainstream Bollywood and the regional ones were churning out films narrating the stories of the heroes in our freedom struggle, without really addressing the post-colonial rhetoric. However, the articulations of the former colonial subjects and their descendents still living in the master countries were considerably different and those who imitated their articulations in the home made versions or even tried to make extensive historical researches to create visual art pieces looked painfully labored and clumsy; nobody know where they have gone these days. For a change, they all have started exploring the origins of imperialism and the trade routes that brought imperialism to our shores in order to make their art distinct.

 (Swiss government installing a commemorative sculpture of Yash Chopra by Nilesh Powalkar)

Perhaps, it was Yash Chopra, one of the master film makers from the mainstream Bollywood genre was the only post colonial film maker who could articulate the anxieties and nostalgia of the present as well as the past time colonial subjects who got willingly trapped in the master countries. In these mega narratives generated in palatial feudal homes and verdant country houses in Britain or elsewhere, amply using the sylvan landscapes of the quintessential Switzerland, around the characters who are permanently caught up in the limbo created by a strong sense of Indian tradition and western modernism. It could be best expressed in suited and booted Khans dancing to the Indian tunes with their customized brides, around a patriarch, often played by Amitabh Bacchan, and characters breaking up and making out at candle lit dinners, or even travelling continents to snatch away an Indian traditional bride to western modernism.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Yash Chopra’s role in playing referee to the contesting post colonial discourse and the cultural discourse that repudiates the post colonial fixations completely is exceptional and his soft diplomacy through films is the only avenue where we see these kinds of post colonial tensions thrashed out amicably. The baton has been handed over to Karan Johar and his films address post colonial issues as a given, as the mother in law- daughter in law tensions are a given in the soap operas in Indian television. For the visual artists, dealing with post colonial issues was a passport to instant international recognition. Removed several years from the actual experiences of the colonial rule in India these artists’ affectations however became a thing of joke soon while a few artists who lived abroad and tuned themselves up to the current discourses could do justice to their visual articulations even if they were not really a part of post colonial subjection. Parthiv Shah is one visual communicator, designer and photography artist from India who could deal with the post-colonial subjectivity intelligently and seriously without claiming anything of post colonialism for himself.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Many people might have already forgotten a moderate exhibition of photographs and empirical data related to those photographs that came with a title ‘Figures, Facts, Feeling- A Direct Diasporic Dialogue’ in the year 2000 at the British Council Gallery in Delhi. The exhibition was by Parthiv Shah, the Delhi based photography artist and alternative visual communicator and it was a part of fulfilling his scholarship agreements with the Charles Wallace Trust which had given him a travel and study grant in Britain in 1998. As you have read the preamble of this essay, you should know what is special about the year 1998. The fag end of the 1990s, internet was already in and also mobile phones were started appearing in the hands of the rich and powerful. India’s roads were full of new model cars for the newly affluent middle class. India was in its global path through open economic policy which turned out to be irreversible (as we know today). Real estate was booming, new educational institutions were springing up, dot com boom was about to take place bringing online magazines and other platforms competitive interfaces in the new Indian market. A new subjectivity was getting formed around the young affluent class and they too were taking interest in acquiring art. Things were all looking rosy and cushy.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Parthiv, born to a Gandhian artist father, Haku Shah, and married to an Indian classical singer, and studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad must have seen the emerging reality of India and its changing cultural and visual landscape with a fair amount of curiosity and guardedness. Entrepreneurial as he was and still is, Parthiv might have seen these changes for furthering his creative career but not in the field of commercial advertisement that coaxed and enticed the consumer into a desire and aspiration. Parthiv, however did not like to see the emergent reality as an opportunity to create desire. Instead he decided to become a visual chronicler of the changing India with its contrasting realisms being played out in the public and private domains. It was when he got the scholarship to go and study in Britain. In fact, throughout the 1990s, Indian artists, both printmakers and painters got the opportunities go abroad and come back equipped to change the Indian visual culture. I should also add that scholarships were given based on coterie allegiance, group dynamics and dinner diplomacy in those years. Imagine, Indian Printmakers guild bagging all the scholarship for its members for many consecutive years! It happens only in India.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings)

Parthiv got his scholarship much later in his career and when he landed in Britain and decided to join the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), he did not really know which anthropological interest he would pursue. Soon he realized that the Indian diaspora had a strong presence in the British life and it could provide an interesting study material. Parthiv’s project ‘Figures, Facts, Feelings’ is not strictly a photography project. It has got the qualities and tendencies of a visual note book where a researcher notes down his findings and observations without fail. Interestingly, there is a method in these random visual notes. As Parthiv understood that this Indian diaspora in Britain, even if they had articulated themselves in different ways, needed some kind of an assertion and they could speak like post colonial subjects because they opted to be post colonial subjects unlike the people who lived in India or in any of the former colonies. The life in India was by choice; it was/is a given for all of us. But the diaspora Indians living in Britain was/is a choice. Their articulation could be beyond any revenge theories as expressed in the Empire talks back and so on and also need not necessarily be driven by hurt sentiments.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

As a photography artist and visual communicator, Parthiv could notice this aspect of the diaspora Indians in Britain. The choice (of living there) had rendered them free and also they could cherish and nourish ideas about India, which at times were full of fondness and at times very poor. As the title shows, Parthiv embarked on a journey initially by befriending a series of Indian settlers there through various contacts and then asking them to be a part of his study project. Hence, there are figures and they are all given a form to fill in as Parthiv observed that the diaspora communities had gone through this filling of various forms as a part of migration and we get a lot of facts about the subjects in nutshell. Then definitely they have their feelings about themselves as well as for their parent country. Parthiv gives them the freedom to choose the location or backdrop against which they would like to be photographed. This freedom to choose the location reflects their freedom to choose the country for their living. Parthiv, as an artist couldn’t have been more liberal than this.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

There are thirty four subjects in this project. Famous photographer Sunil Janah, famous political theoretician and author Sunil Khilnani, well known art dealer Behroz Gandhy and so on appear in this project along with twenty years old students and toddlers who love chocolates and think about India as a ‘poverty’ stricken place. Parthiv asks a few questions which are intrusive at times and generic mostly. However, none takes offence with his intrusive questions like ‘one’s age and education’. A Sikh middle aged man is just fifth standard pass and he leads a totally religious life while handling his business in Britain. Sunil Janah predictably would like to show himself in his darkroom where he processes his negatives, Sunil Khilnani (author of the highly acclaimed book ‘Incarnations’) is seen like an unsure young gentleman in a garden and a very confident political theorist in his study room strewn with hundreds of books. We see people preferring themselves to be seen in a very sober and intelligent set up as they willingly participate in a project like this. What surprises is a lady opting to be seen inside a toilet/bathroom as she finds it as the most ‘peaceful’ place in her home or rather in her life. Young people are seen in their bedrooms sitting casually or playfully. There is a grandfather giving musical lessons to the grand children. There is a medical engineer in his study and a doctor in her library.

 (from Parthiv Shah's Figures, Facts, Feelings series)

Most of them do not shy away from speaking about their age, education and the choices in their lives. While the photographs tell a few things about the subjects, the questionnaire that accompanies these images tells everything about these subjects. Interestingly, most of them prefer old Hindi film songs as a vehicle that would transport them to their nostalgic past. Many of them have ‘Mother India’, ‘Pakeeza’, ‘Mughal e Azam’ as their favorite films. The grand narratives that built India during the independence and after still linger on in their minds as they like to see India as a part of the grand narrative of the world itself. A couple of them choose Satyajit Ray movies (like Apur Sansar) and one of them chooses Subarnarekha by Rwitik Ghatak. When a girl says that she likes the movie ‘Lahme’, we understand that the diaspora to has moved on to the recent times.

(Parthiv Shah with musician wife Vidya Shah)

Parthiv did this project when there was no special place for photography or experimental installations with photography as a main component in Indian art scene. Today a lot of young photography artists use anthropological documentations in order to get their aesthetical ideas across. Parthiv is one of the pioneers in Indian experimental photography using anthropological methods. But ironically he came much ahead of time. His exhibition in 2000 had an accompanying catalogue which contained a few interesting studies on photography and cinema written by authors including Christopher Pinney and Rachel Dyer who later became important voices in Indian photography and film studies. Though, a few other articles included in the catalogue now look like over embellishment, we could say that it was a time when such efforts to showcase exclusive photographic discourses were hardly done, hence it was the need of the time. It would be interesting if artists, curators and photography experts would make a revisit to this project of Parthiv Shah and push the discourse further.  

An Artist Who Draws the Web of Life in Colorful Illusions: Life of Shashikant Dhotre

(artist Shashikant Dhotre giving a television interview)

This is the story of a mason who is not a freemason. Considering the boyhood experiences of this mason, he could have become a sculptor. But he was not that kind of a mason who had the inclinations of either an architect or of a sculptor. Between the stone that he cut and the sand he sieved he saw the lines running vertical and horizontal and whenever he got time he kept on drawing on the sand loaded on the trucks.

Sitting on the trucks that ran to the construction sites, this boy in his teens dreamt of a day that he would become an artist. Though he wanted to be an artist, he did not know the great names of the Indian art scene, let alone the names of the international artists. What he had seen in those days were the calendars and film posters. He liked the facial features of Amitabh Bacchan and Aishwarya Rai and even Rajni Kant. When he drew these images on paper, people gathered around him and exhorted him to draw more. Some even bought off his portraits done in ‘Natraj’ pencil on simple white paper.

On 1^st April 2016, the noted film actor and activist, Aamir Khan presented our ‘mason’ with the ‘Lokmat Maharashtrian of the Year 2016’ award in the presence of the Chief of Minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Phadnavis. This was one of the many awards that our mason turned artist has been receiving since 2009. The day he decided to leave his mason-work behind and become an artist, things changed for him.

You may all know his name and work. His name is Shashikant Dhotre and he is a super realist artist. Shashikant Dhotre had a little tryst with academic education in art but life had something else in store for him. The story of Shashikant’s life must be a fascinating one for many. 

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Medium Color pencils on paper)

From Vashi in Navi Mumbai (New Bombay), Shashikant drives us to his studio located at the outskirts of the sprawling suburb with a highway running towards Pune. From the air-cooled interiors of his black BMW car the passing sceneries look like a muted travel program in television. Summer sun blazes and silver flames play at the tip of the palm trees carefully cultivated along the spacious road to give it a Dubai look.

Shashikant Dhotre is soft spoken. Three years back, when he had posted a picture of his new BMW car, many took it as a joke. And despite the skepticism about his new acquisition abound, the ‘likes’ were pouring in. Shashikant credits this overwhelming response to his ‘fans’ who are in thousands right from rural Maharashtra to strange shores of distant continents. Fan following, fame and fortune have not changed the man inside Shashikant, the successful artist, a bit. The jammed left backside door of his BMW stands evidence to this unchanged nature of Shashikant.

“A few friends in Solapur, where I was born and brought up, were having some fun time with my car when I took it to the village first,” Shashikant remembers. “I did not stop them. They were all happy for my success and fame. But they did not know that the BMW have a super sensitive magnetic lock system in its doors. They banged it close and it got permanently jammed. I got so busy that I could not send it to the showroom for a change,” smiles Shashikant at the wheels. His driver is on leave today. 

(work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

Born to a mason’s home, Shashikant is the second eldest of the four sons and two daughters of his parents. Financial conditions were not so rosy at home and Shashikant was not so enthusiastic about pursuing an academic career. But he found himself drawing on whatever surface he could. Natraj pencil was his only tool then. By the time he reached high school he decided to drop out and join his father as a helper in construction sites. Years went by and his enthusiasm grew as he was toiling at quarries and rivers. It was then someone told he could study art formally. But he had to pass tenth and intermediate to get through in a fine arts college.

Hard work paid off. Fighting poverty and an alcoholic father, and above all the growing insecurities around, Shashikant, with the help of good Samaritans studied privately and sat for tenth and intermediate examinations and came out even if not with flying colors, some colors to his satisfaction. The illustrious J.J.School in Mumbai was waiting for him. He gave the entrance test and it was an easy walk over. The year was 2003. He could not finish more than three months in his first year, by then the condition back home grew from bad to worse. He had to extend a helping hand to his mother who had been working then as a domestic help. Without thinking much Shashikant dropped out once again and went back to his village.

However, this time Shashikant had something different in his mind. He had told himself that he was not going to become a mason like his father. And definitely he was not going to drink alcohol. He decided to draw the faces of the people in a nearby town. He had not yet tried color pencils. With black lead pencil, he could create the likeness of any sitter in startlingly original fashion. His prowess was not only in capturing the likeness of the sitter but also the folds and creases of the sitter’s clothes. He did not know, art historically it is called ‘drapery painting’. 

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color pencil on Paper)

Shashikant’s patrons were so happy to see a young boy sitting at the street corner, drawing the portraits of the interested passersby and selling them for paltry sums. They took him home and commissioned him to draw family portraits. Instead of his nominal remuneration, they showered him with praises and money. Shashikant now could experiment with color pencils. He kept his study going with color pencils and sooner than later, he became a master in using the color pencils too. The money that he gained from the benevolent patrons helped him to support his mother and ease her out of menial jobs. He saved enough to study an animation course in Pune and he decided to try his luck in the city of dreams, Mumbai again.

The year was 2007. Shashikant came to Mumbai and joined one of the animation studios. Sooner than later he understood that it was one of the most boring jobs though it was called a ‘creative’ job. They obviously were using his skills in drawing but he was not deriving any satisfaction from his work. He thought he was doing some assembly line work or patch work in a factory. He wanted to express himself and at the same time he wanted to earn more.

Prakash, a friend of Shashikant for year is still with him in his Navi Mumbai studio. The rise in Shashikant’s career graph has not changed the relationship between these two people for the simple reason that Prakash was his only comrade when Shashikant decided to quit the animation film industry and go solo in his career. But what solo? These two friends put their heads together to come up with a new idea.

They created a pamphlet and the pamphlet said that they were artists and they could create interesting bedrooms for the kids. They said that they could paint the walls of the children’s bedrooms with the superheroes the children liked and also could create the portraits of the kids along with their favorite heroes. Early in the morning, both Shashikant and Prakash walked to the newspaper boys and requested them to place the pamphlets in the newspapers before delivery. They complied and before ten o clock next morning, Shashikant and Prakash were getting non-stop calls. 

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

A new career started for Shashikant. He painted the bedrooms of rich kids. One painting led to more commissioning from the rich people because they all wanted to have the same glory for their kids. It brought the artists money and they could now afford to lead a proper life. Yet, renting out a place to stay was still difficult. Some political connections back home had helped Shashikant to temporarily put up in the Maharashtra Sadan in Mumbai. Now they were thinking to shift to their own rented apartment.

Shashikant, though he studied only for three months in the JJ School of Art, had developed strong friendship with students and maintained even after many years. One of the friends from the JJ times came to Shashikant’s lodge and was shocked to see a wonderful painting, a portrait of a girl, on the table. The friend was on his way to submit one of his paintings to the Bombay Art Society’s annual art competition. He requested Shashikant to send his painting to the professional category. But Shashikant denied saying that the painting on the table was already sold and he would make one if needed. That night Shashikant did not sleep. He made another painting on paper (with color pencils) and submitted it to the society next day in the professional category. The year was 2009.

When the results were announced Shashikant turned out to be the winner. It was the beginning point of a successful career. A couple of awards followed the Art Society award. In 2011, the India Art Festival in Mumbai adjudged Shashikant as the best painter of the year in the young artists’ category. It gives me a lot of pleasure to say that I was instrumental in adjudging Shashikant’s work as the best one in the given category. 

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

I still remember the award function. Shashikant was in a pair of jeans and T-shirt. When his name was called out, a minister from the Maharashtra cabinet was looking around for an imposing artist to walk up to him. Upon seeing a humble young boy, the minister was thrilled and in his speech he was in full praise for the artists from rural Maharashtra. Next day, the media took up the story of Shashikant and he became an overnight sensation in Mumbai and elsewhere.

In Shashikant’s studio in Navi Mumbai, one wouldn’t see too many works. Yet, there are three in different stages of completion. From the climate controlled studio, through a glass wall Shashikant could see the city out there, the highway where the vehicles plying to different destinations, thickets growing, a flocks of birds making different formations of surviving and winning.

The paintings feature rural Maharashtra scenes; to be precise Maharashtrian women involved in different homely activities. Time stands frozen in Shashikant’s works. He takes the photographs of his family members and friends in different dresses and engaged in different domestic activities. For him, these activities and these draperies give ample chances to display his skill in painting with color pencils and at times crayon pencils. Feminists cannot question Shashikant for making the women simple objects of male gaze for he absolutely leaves no chance for such gaze. These women are not voluptuous but they are beautiful and sensual. They are like cultural emblems captured by a very gifted painter. 

(Work by Shashikant Dhotre- Color Pencil on Paper)

The lack of paintings or a stack of it in reserve is explained away by Shashikant with a smile. He says that each painting that he does is demanded by more than three collectors from all over India. That means all the time the buyers are waiting for his works. How could he be a fast deliverer when each of his works needs almost a month to finish? Shashikant knows his selling potential. But he is not a fast seller. He shows them in solo exhibitions before he sells them off. And where does he exhibit?

Shashikant exhibits in Jehangir. People have seen his works there. But this artist with a strong rural background before selling his works makes it a point to take his works to the rural Maharashtra. He has a very good team of rural friends who have now become adept in handling the sensitivities of a work of art in display. With their help he takes the paintings to rural areas in Maharashtra and shows them in community halls and temple halls. “Thousands of people come to see my paintings and most of them hug me and weep. Perhaps, they respond much better than the city art lovers. I am so blessed that I get people queue-ing up in front of my gallery wherever I exhibit, including the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai,” says Shashikant.

Is Shashikant happy about his journey? In a candid conversation, Shashikant confesses that he needs to do more to get what he wants in his works. “I have got what I wanted through my works. But I have not yet got what I want in my works. I am still striving to get it.” The fan following, the acceptance by the public and even by the government does not replace the need for taking his works to the next level of perfection. It is not just about getting the patterns, light and illusion right. But it is all about getting the artist himself inextricably within the work.

 (Artist Shashikant Dhotre)

Shashikant looks out through the glass wall right in front of him. The sky has gone red in the horizon and the sky rise buildings have turned themselves into silhouettes blinking with neon lights. 

“Disparities,” sighs Shashikant. “Disparities worry me. Rituals and spectacles- we want only that. None thinks about re-distribution of excess. My works, I hope, would one day reach to that level of speaking about such re-distributions.”

If you will, you can.

If silence could have wheels, then we wheel back to where we had started in the afternoon, as consolidate silences. 

The City Through Slum Children’s Eyes @ Mandi House Metro

(exhibition at Mandi House Metro)

At the busy Central Secretariat Metro station in Delhi, I see a girl child of seven years just accidently dropping her snack that her mother with a sleeping infant cradled across the hands, has bought for her from the refreshment counter over there. 

The world seems to have frozen for that child. Astonished, shaken and deeply sad, the child stands in front of that snack, which she wants to pick up but she stops as if ordained by some invisible rules. The mother too freezes. Unlike the rich parents who would pick it up and throw it into the dust bin, this young woman just cannot do it. She wants the child to take it from the floor, wipe it off of dust particles and eat it. 

Somehow, I just cannot stand looking at that scene. I walk off. 

There are three moments. The moment when the mother’s love and the child’s demand for a snack meet at a common point and happiness swells in their minds. There is a second moment when the child receives it as if world’s best food has been given to her. The third moment is the moment of its accidental dropping.

Children are very special creatures from heaven. They come with a pair of wings. And as they grow up their feathers are clipped one by one, rendering them into people like us; the ordinary mortals. 

(one of the exhibits at Mandi House)

I take a different line to reach Mandi House, which is a couple of stations away. Inside the coach, with embodied impatience stands hanging from the railings I stand like a silent scream wondering whether the child would have picked up her snack from the floor or not.

The huge distance that suddenly emerged between the child and the snack on the floor weighs me down. If she picks it up, then it must be seen as a willing suspension of both the mother’s and the daughter’s fear of contracting some illnesses due to bad hygiene. If she doesn’t it will be asu huge as the collapse of a gigantic structure of hope, all tumbling over her. 

If she would pick it up and eat it, she would forget the incident sooner than later. If she wouldn’t, she would never forget that moment etched in her memory with the acid of desire and despair. In future, for her, the Central Secretariat Metro station would be nothing but the place where she had dropped her snack. Each time she would see that snack prettily sitting in the glass cases in any part of the world, in any given time or season, she would see only that moment of it dropping from her hand and she standing there with her head hanging for the utter loss.

I come out from the coach. Take the escalator to come to the concourse and look at the walls where a few frames are exhibited. I am familiar with the exhibition walls in the Metro stations in Delhi where thematic pictures are exhibited periodically. A project of the Delhi Metro in collaboration with the India Habitat Centre, and several other agencies depending on the subject of the exhibition, these public shows are meant to make people aesthetically aware of the ‘topics and issues’ that are pivotal to the society and are a ‘must know’ for an urban citizen. 

(Exhibition @ Mandhi House Metro)

A couple of weeks back, on the same walls I had seen interesting book cover designs. Displayed in collaboration with the Oxford University Press, this exhibition had evoked a sense of pride in me for the simple reason that many of the book covers that I saw there were either read or referred by me previously. A sense of familiarity with any kind of exhibits imparts a feeling of elation to the viewer, which is one of the boons of seeing an art exhibition. 

I do not know how many of us stand and stare at these walls and the exhibits on them. Time and again the spiritual gurus of India and the philosophers in general have been telling us to be inward looking people to lead a clear life. Of late we seem to have got the message clearly. We have become ‘inward’ looking people and our inward is nothing but our glowing smartphone screens. Hence, nobody sees what is going on in the world out there. Reality is now a reversed phenomenon experienced in terms of moving and static visuals and data in the phone screens. The world immediately outside of it is more or less non-existent or is deemed as a mere habitat. ‘I look at my phone, therefore I am ‘ is the new motto. If you do not, then you don’t exist.

One of the neon lit boards on display tells me poor sanitation and lack of potable water is the major causes of child death all over the world. Three thousand kids die a day globally because of consumption of unhygienic water and food.

(The girl who has just bent to pick up her snack is stopped in midway. Don’t, my child. I am coming. I could buy one for you, fresh). 

(Exhibition @ Mandi House Metro)

A new exhibition has been propped up in the walls of the Mandi House Metro station. I walk up to them and watch. These are the photographs taken by the children-photographers who live in the slums or shanty towns in North and South East Delhi. These re-settlements are called JJ Clusters, which mean Juggi Jhopdi; the abode of the real Aam Aadmi. Literally speaking, the victory of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi is assured by the innumerable votes from these shanty towns.

Non-Government Organizations or NGOs are very active in these zones. More than eradication, they aim at the maintenance of the JJ Clusters with better sanitation, awareness, health and education though they seem to be unachievable dreams. Save the Child is one such organization that has taken the responsibility of handing the cameras over to the children in these shanty towns. Hence, what we see here are the pictures taken by children about themselves.

What makes the photographs visually appealing is the absolute erasure of gaze. A lens man’s or lens woman’s gaze is so powerful that the subject turns into an object, almost helpless in all its authority and autonomy. There are no ‘innocent’ smiles or ‘curious’ eyes or ‘painful’ enthusiasm in these pictures. It is more like a Truffaut film dismantled into different frames. 

These kids live in the JJ Clusters. When they are asked to train the cameras at their own life, their approach is completely different than those of the outsider photographers. They just look at the places that they haunt with a sense of celebration and right. They do not have playgrounds. They convert any available plot which doubles up as dump yards into their playgrounds. They do not have swimming pools so they cool off in the nullahs or drains that are filled with chemical effulgence from the factories and general dirt. They do gymnastics over the toxic pipelines. 

In short they ‘play’ with their lives. They perhaps know it, or they do not know it. But whether they know it or not, they do not have any other way. They do not have any other place to go.

Twenty four per cent of the girl children from these shanties drop out from the schools. Where do they go? They do not go anywhere. They come to our homes, as maid servants. They come to us as vegetable sellers. They come to us as road sweepers. And a majority of them do not even get mentioned in our lives. They come and go, leaving no traces, but really wounded and scarred. But look at the photographs taken by their own friends. The co-existence of the animal and people, their love for each other is so touching in these frames. 

(Exhibition at Mandi House Metro)

Children are citizen journalists not because they watch a lot of debate television. They are citizen journalists because they know camera is something that registers and take the images beyond the limits of their colonies. And also they know that if the images could travel beyond their colonies, they would communicate their views to others. It is an innate knowledge for survivals. Hence, in their pictures we see eateries at the shore of exposed drains and the heaps of filths. Children know that they are exposing the shortcomings of their surroundings but they do it with a purpose; they need response.

I keep looking at these pictures. Suddenly I feel like standing aside and watching other people, who are in thousands coming out and going into the trains, coming forward to look at these displayed works. For almost ten minutes I stand there to record the ‘viewers’. Apart from cursory glances there are no real viewers. Young people just sit down, right under these frames without knowing what is going on in these pictures.

May be, subconsciously the urban citizen, in his/her impatient and rushing life, imbibe the effects of these pictures, slowly but steadily, I hope. 

I wish the children photographers were named. 

I also wish the girl child would get her snack.