Small is big

When it comes to documentary photography, what interests me the most is the everyday life of people engaged in their chores. Rather than focusing on the rich and famous, people on the margins are the closest to my heart and are therefore an integral part of my image-making practice.

While engaging with them during my forays into the streets and markets, I often observe that in spite of being at the lowest ebb of our social structure and facing all kinds of adversities, they work hard with a sense of dignity and a smile on their face. A certain degree of lyrical rhythm permeates in their body language as if some unstruck music (anhad dhun) is playing inside their souls. A feeling of joy in their working routine is something to watch.

One feels pleasure at the sense of pride with which they earn their living, but at the same time a strain of pain engulfs looking at the treatment they get in spite of being an integral part of our social structure, and their contribution to our economy.

Trees play an important role in the lives of these almost invisible members of our urban spaces. It’s amazing how abandoned material goods, nooks and corners are brought to life by repurposing these into a tea-stall, a dyer’s joint, a shoe mender’s khokha, a cycle repair adda or something seemingly innocuous but nevertheless relevant to a whole bunch of residents. The coexistence of multiple facets of our social and economic strata such as a swanky car, a humble rickshaw, a cycle, a cart, a cow or a dog in the same narrow space are a given and lend unusual aesthetics to the surroundings.

In our urban dwellings, the onlooker is filled with wonder at the glimpses of civilisational continuity amid all the hulla-gulla of artificial intelligence, space walks, bullet trains and the fuss of modernity co-existing with the archaic, the medieval, the traditional and the historical.

This image is from a market of Sector 16, Chandigarh.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based artist/photographer