Country: Portrait of an Indian Village
Mundia Pamar is a small village about seventeen kilometres North of the district town of Shahjahanpur in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. My family’s oral history has it that around three hundred years ago a woman arrived here with a baby fleeing an internecine conflict in a neighbouring state. This surviving child is the ancestor of about five hundred living relatives scattered across the Hindi speaking North from Patna to Bikaner. I am one of them.
My father was born and brought up in this village, although he was sent out to school and the military and never really returned to live. I was born in Delhi and this ancestral landscape became a legendary place that we really only visited annually for Holi. As immigrants in the West this landscape assumed mythical proportions.
Over the years, I’ve photographed it sporadically as part of of my family album. Now that my father has died, I have become intensely interested in how the family is organised and its relationship to the land, it’s sexuality and its own feudal history.
The photographs presented here are part of a larger project that I have embarked upon as a homage to the book “Un Paese” (Italy, 1955) by Paul Strand, a portrait of an Italian village. I realise that the Indian village is no longer fashionable, but for me it’s part of a life-long interest in the family album and the construction of gender and sexuality within it and the outward expression of these issues as property and inheritance.
My father was born and brought up in this village, although he was sent out to school and the military and never really returned to live. I was born in Delhi and this ancestral landscape became a legendary place that we really only visited annually for Holi. As immigrants in the West this landscape assumed mythical proportions.
Over the years, I’ve photographed it sporadically as part of of my family album. Now that my father has died, I have become intensely interested in how the family is organised and its relationship to the land, it’s sexuality and its own feudal history.
The photographs presented here are part of a larger project that I have embarked upon as a homage to the book “Un Paese” (Italy, 1955) by Paul Strand, a portrait of an Italian village. I realise that the Indian village is no longer fashionable, but for me it’s part of a life-long interest in the family album and the construction of gender and sexuality within it and the outward expression of these issues as property and inheritance.
