SUNIL GUPTA
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​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.
  • Home
  • Shop
    • Category
  • Photography
    • Arrival
    • Songs of Deliverance — Part 1
    • Songs of Deliverance — Part 2
    • Helmut Lang Christopher Street
    • Sun City
    • The New Pre-Raphaelites
    • Love, Undetectable
    • Women in Love
    • Stockwell
    • Mr Malhotra's Party
    • Country: Portrait of an Indian Village
    • Imagining Childhood
    • Love and Light
    • Tales of a City: Delhi
    • Homelands
    • From Here to Eternity
    • Trespass 3
    • Trespass 2
    • Trespass 1
    • "Pretended" Family Relationships
    • Exiles
    • Lovers: Ten Years On
    • Reflections of the Black Experience
    • Asians / Bradford
    • London 1982
    • Christopher Street, New York 1976
    • Friends & Lovers: Coming Out in Montréal in the 1970s
    • Social Security
  • Books
    • We Were Here : Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference
    • London 1982
    • From Here To Eternity
    • Lovers Ten Years On
    • Christopher Street
    • Delhi: Communities of Belonging
    • Queer
    • Wish You Were Here
    • Pictures From Here
    • Exiles
    • Trespass
    • Disrupted Borders
    • An Economy of Signs
    • Ecstatic Antibodies
  • Video
  • Curating
    • Same Difference
    • Fernando Arias
    • Divine Facades
    • Simryn Gill
    • The New Republics
    • Joy Gregory
    • Stevie Bezencenet
  • Columns
    • A Return from Exile
    • Relative Values
    • The End of Marriage
    • A Laying on of Hands
    • City of Dreams
    • Oral History
    • Pride and Prejudice
  • Work
  • Press
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Books
  • Come Out
  • Books