Snapshots

Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi: Building cities to introduce modernity to the country was one of the wishes of India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru. All hailing from these metropolises that are emblematic of growth in India, the photographers Sameer Tawde, Saibal Das, and Ravi Agarwal guide us on a journey from the historical city centers to the distant suburbs. The film explores the sprawling world-city of Mumbai; the vestige of British rule that is Kolkata; and the city-within-a-city, given how New Delhi has swallowed up ancient Delhi, illustrating the brutal rupture between the urban environment and nature, especially the great sacred rivers, places of worship for Hindus.

Poverty, pariah women, caste rigidity: These are familiar ills in India, even today. To grasp the scale of the problem, we meet photojournalists Sudharak Olwe, Sanjit Das, and Mansi Thapliyal, who between them illustrate their country’s shocking inequalities. The film switches from the city to the countryside, taking in nomadic dancers from the villages of Maharashtra, peasants of Odisha dispossessed by aluminum companies, “untouchable” trash collectors in the slums of Mumbai, the jute merchants of the Brahmaputra, and the fiefdom of the yogi in Rishikesh in the foothills of the Himalayas, capturing the deep-rooted inequalities in Indian society.

What does it mean to be Indian? Yesterday a British colony, today in the grip of rampant globalization, India is looking for its true face. The father of Indian photography, Raghu Rai has devoted his entire career to capturing the diversity of the landscapes, communities and customs that have shaped India over the past five decades. His valuable testimony is taken further by the work in blue, black and white of photographer Uzma Mohsin. In Goa, the multicultural melting pot that has become a tourist hub, she observes a mini-India in the throes of unbridled globalization. In the foothills of the Himalayas, Dileep Prakash illustrates the colonial context in which the young Indian nation was constructed. His work on the traces of the British past serves as a strong reminder that this complex country can only fully exist by embracing both its diversity and its past.

Until very recently, the Indian lifestyle was one of community, but the move towards greater individualism has inspired the work of some increasingly introspective photographers. A pioneer of this new intimate approach, Pablo Bartholomew has produced a dense body of work, based on his youth in the libertarian India of the 1970s and 80s. In his wake, Atul Loke has become a key witness of the disappearance of collective life by always photographing the building where he grew up. This immersion in the collective Indian psyche intensifies with the work of Sohrab Hura, whose private journal documenting his mother’s schizophrenia caused a sensation in a society where the maternal figure remains absolutely sacred.