SC:

 I think I’d like to start off with what drew me into photography, which will give a clearer idea about my practice. A big part of why I began was because it gave me an opportunity to be out in the world. I was eight years old when I received a camera as a gift, and it became an obsession. Things weren’t great at home, and so the camera allowed me to step-out and find beauty. And so, the process became as important as the final photographs.

I enjoy the act of walking, and observing. And when I pause, and have found something interesting, my inquiry becomes more critical. Which is why when I first visited Rajarhat to look for a flat for my parents, I was initially drawn to the landscape, and the newness of it. Until I started realising how strange it looks since I had never seen something like this in Calcutta.

I was walking on a long stretch of highway on one side, and open fields full of people working in farms, and cows on the other side. Then, huge glass buildings emerged, disappearing into the smog. And this jarring contrast prompted me to think more deeply into this space and my involvement, which began with my own lived experience.

SC:

 That's an amazing question, as it gives me a lot to think about. Since I come from a background in photojournalism, and as a newspaper photographer, my process has always been documentary centric. 

Photographs have been a form of evidence, and that's how I started this work. Here, I wasn’t solely trying to record, but also explore forms of memory building, and archiving. A few years later, when I was looking through my archives of these documentary images from Rajarhat, I started thinking more deeply about what I was trying to say. Earlier, I was so enamoured by the uncanniness and absurdity of the place, that I didn't really think much about what I was photographing. But once the novelty had worn off, I did more research and spoke to the local people, not just from within my own community, but those who have historically tilled the lands.

The revelations from those conversations gave me an idea of Rajarhat, which is not central to the dominant narrative of development the urban elites within my parents’ apartment believed in. If you research Rajarhat on Google, there are stories of development, and of it being a smart city. But when I spoke to the people, I understood that there has been insidious violence of land grabs and ecological destruction that has been part of the land for years.

I was reading a lot of post-colonial and decolonial literature, and philosophy by Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha, and it made me think about how I can make the work deeper than just a simple documentation of the place. How can I embed these histories of violence? How can I talk about the caste violence is embedded in the land itself? Because, as you know, the beneficiaries of development are usually oppressor-caste folks like us. And that's also a big part of why my parents were trying to buy a flat there.

I think that was the tipping point for me, when I realised that I need to talk about my own position in this whole system. And to make myself complicit in that history of the land, I started looking at specific aspects. For instance, there is a photograph of a man lying on the ground, who looks like he's shot and is covered in blood. The reality of this image is that I photographed it during the festival of Holi, and he was completely drunk. And for me, this symbolises something more than that. When I strip it away from its context without any explanation, I am manipulating the meaning just as much as history is manipulated in this land.

My other intention was to make spectacular of this gentrification, and of this violence of land grab, which has almost become banal in our lives. So, I wanted to move away from making ordinary things look poetic, and instead make the work look and feel quite spectacular. And in this way, I hope that my audiences start registering that this is something more than documentation.

SC:

Absolutely, and it’s interesting because when I began thinking about the best way to seriously consider this body of work, I began walking around the border of Rajarhat. And a lot emerged from walking around the periphery. Here, I noticed nothing fits neatly into any one category. Two ecosystems met here: the new housing and the wetlands. The boundary carried residues from both these environments, and new interactions were created by this overlap. 

Here I photographed a book being burnt on a gravelled road, a sign that says "Government Land” and a horse grazing aimlessly outside tall buildings under construction at dusk. These encounters seemed almost theatrical. 

And I think there was something about this that stayed with me. There's a porousness between the land that ‘belongs,’ and the land that's ‘free.’ And I think that dichotomy is so much more jarring when you see it. The spectacle of belonging and ownership was performed here. It’s a strange liminal space- a confluence between the two worlds, separated by nothing really. 

SC:

After I moved to the UK, I realised that there are hardly any free or affordable spaces for new voices. Each person who is now in the collective had the same thought through their individual experiences, and so we decided to come together. Working multiple minimum-wage jobs also made it tough for me to keep the creative spirit alive, and this is when this space of friends and photographers helped because we would meet once a week and even visit exhibitions together, go out for food and talk about our life. 

For Photo Fringe, we decided to apply together for the Collectives Hub, in response to the theme Future Histories open call. We were thrilled to be selected. I think our strength lies in the fact that each of us have unique and distinctive voices, which are vastly different from one another.

We explore themes of selfhood, identity, family, gender, relationships with nature, time, outer space and imagined futures. And while they’re so different, they still sit together visually and are connected by the thread of our shared friendships and values.

SC:

I think I am responsible about what I'm speaking of when I'm showing work such as A New World, especially outside of India. People often ask me what it feels like to show your work in London? When they say it, they mean the heart of the empire. And my response to them is that there's a strong belief, especially within Indians who migrate here, that we cannot show India in a certain way. We cannot be critical, because we have a reputation to protect. But I don't buy into that. I think we are equally complicit in ideas of coloniality. We reproduce them, we replicate them, and we subjugate people from the margins, using those same colonial values and structures. It's embedded in our everyday practices. The story of Rajarhat is just that.

And I think moving to the UK, and being involved with the Brighton Ambedkar Reading Circle has made me aware of the injustices that even I have perpetuated coming from a Brahminical family. And I think that it's my responsibility to acknowledge that and some of the harm through my photographic practice, even if it shows up in intangible ways.

And it's a really good question, because nobody has asked me this, but I think

we need to acknowledge this now. The popular narrative usually talks about what Rajarhat looked like in the 90s, and its “development,” because people think of time in terms of change in landscape. But I want to showcase the threats of violence that are embedded in these sites of rapid change. And I don't know if it comes through, but that has been my effort so far.