A few months ago, three Indian photographers — Paroma Mukherjee, Kounteya Sinha and Shome Basu — were selected to pursue an intriguing task across Europe. In what could be described as a dream for most of their peers, the three were asked to pick countries of their choice to go on individual journeys. The idea was to document the lives of Indians in the European Union (EU) in a first-of-its-kind project by the Delegation of the European Union to India.
The search was not only for technically-skilled photographers but also those who would be intrinsically interested in the subject. Although all three are photojournalists who have had a long association with news publications, their outlooks were as diverse as Indian or European culture is.
The result is New Homelands: The Indian Diaspora in the European Union, an exhibition of images culled from the project by Dr. Alka Pande and her curatorial team. After a show in October at Delhi’s Habitat Centre, the exbhibition has arrived in Mumbai. Cesare Onestini, Deputy Head of the delegation, says, “Indians are a growing community in Europe but very little is known about them, especially of those outside the U.K.” He says, “We thought it would be interesting to look at the lives and journeys of some of the many Indians who have settled in the European Union, which is one of the most open, multi-racial, multi-ethnic societies in the world.”
Delving deep
Mukherjee steered clear of the prototypical photojournalistic frames, which are usually overtly layered and jump out at the viewer. She says, “For me, the idea was to photograph people in an understated manner and let the caption/text also work with the image and perhaps reveal something about them that was not obvious in their literal introductions.” Stressing on her relatively newfound love for colour photography, Mukherjee says she was always sure of eschewing black-and-white photography for the project. It was exciting for her to see how this would play out against the pale European palette. Her attempts are evident in the subdued, moody and calm portraits. She also chose spaces that enhanced the simplicity she strived for and shot her subjects in either their homes, workspaces or outdoors in spots they frequented. For instance, there’s a windswept portrait of poet Nita Mishra picking berries from a hill near her home in Dublin. Then there’s the camera-shy artist and cloth merchant Pravin Cherkoori, whom Mukherjee caught right before he turned away.
Nita Mishra, Dublin.
Sinha travelled to the bigger countries: Spain and Italy, and smaller ones such as Slovenia, Lithuania and Cyprus. He says, “In my stories, you will see immense struggle, endless heartbreak but a feisty character: the one who survived against all odds, the Indian who made Europe kneel with his tenacity to survive, and an undying need to be successful.” Sinha brings you stories that cut through caste, class and profession: from an 8 p.m. date with Sardar Singh of Jammu, who sells his paintings outside the Colosseum in Rome, to Biswajit Banerjee from Kolkata, who is now the chief economist and executive director of the Bank of Slovenia. His subjects lifestyles and trajectories are as distinct as you can imagine but “…talk about India and their eyes water, their voice(s) shake,” he says. “That was unanimous: the longing for that homeland. So many years away from home and yet they embraced me with a warmth that still remained scorching even after decades of European winter.”
For Basu, who journeyed from Eastern Europe, through Central, Western and finally to the South, the economic status and struggles of Indians were a major point of interest. “The main question I carried in my mind was ‘were the Indians living in EU, migrants or expats?’ I asked each of them. All of them were happy to be expats although they had the traits of being a migrant. So I focused on the economic diversity of the Indians living in EU.” Basu went looking for stories of common Indians and met his subjects randomly in the street, at bus and train stations, and temples and restaurants, apart from contacts through friends he knew. His slice-of-life images will show you how “in Poland, Ganesh immersion takes place with the same paraphernalia like it happens in Mumbai”.
Though through his career Basu has been reporting on migration and diaspora, meeting Indians in such large numbers in seven countries was “pretty new”.
Krishna Dutta, Stockholm.
True to its form
Mukherjee uses “short-term diaspora”, a rather interesting term, to describe her stint as documentor. For about two months she traced the lives of fellow Indians in a foreign land. She felt she was still an outsider to a community where nationality or roots were not always enough to create a sense of belonging. She says, “What people retain is mostly personal, not necessarily cultural or patriotic.” For someone looking for individuality in her subjects — not as migrants, NRIs or expats — but as people in their working and personal lives, this was an important assessment. Often, in images that are pre-visualised on the basis of information and not pure personal observation, the person in focus with their vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies is lost somewhere. The story or an attribute of the individual gains precedence over peculiarities that might be only fleeting impressions to some. But to those who know the subject closely, these will be hallmark traits that make someone unmistakably and completely themselves.
Surprising subjects
“Photographs need to be real. Not created,” says Sinha. “My approach was simple: stop, knock, meet, discover and reveal. And that is what I did. Every human story is worth documenting. That is how one finds ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I documented this incredible community by catching them by surprise.” In a project of this nature, where there is still an understanding and a certain familiarity between the two — the photographer and the photographed — lines between the real and the created do often get blurred. To place a subject in a specific environment in itself creates a certain framework for the image within which the photographer acts. He/she can control the action or react organically to the setting. In either case, the photographer is still the maker or the creator of the image, deciding when the shutter clicks and what all it frames.
Basu prefers the longer form of photography that requires more than one image to tell a tale. “Photographers are storytellers,” he says. “I don’t believe in a single picture.” His other bodies of work, on places such as Kashmir and Paris, reflect a similar approach. Portraits of the diaspora might be specific stories within stories, but the broader picture is still of a community settled abroad.
On choosing photography as a medium of communication for the project, Onestini says, “Photographs and captions say a great deal in a very short time, and they reach out to many more people than scholarly articles, which of course also have their own place in a more analytical understanding of the diaspora.” It is fascinating to see years of a person’s life compressed in one image and maybe that is why a portrait is much more than just another photograph.
New Homelands: The Indians in the European Union begins today at Piramal Gallery, NCPA. On till December 18.
The author is a Mumbai-based freelance photographer and writer
