India at Home by photographer Amit Pasricha reiterates that the lens is now looking bookwards. Ankita Jain reports
The little ones along with their parents chip in to help build their home made up of bamboo and mud. This moment is beautifully captured in one of the photographs by Amit Pasricha in his latest bookIndia at home. “It is one of the funniest photographs in the book. They are building their house, and there is clearly one thing which is going wrong. And it is the way they are building it. First, the bamboo frame is made and then you are supposed to put the mud inside the house. Since, it takes a week to dry completely, the outer filling of mud is the later procedure but the family in the picture opts for the other way; first the outer filling and then the inner. It is an entire family operation of trying to make a living,” laughs Amit who comes from a family of photographers.
The foreword of the book has been authored by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. When asked Amit about his book, India at Home, he first shares one of his early works with a smile on his face, “In the era when I was into film processing, I attempted to do a book on the weddings in India also featuring ethnic marriages. Towards the end of that book when I was putting all the materials together, I looked at all the urban weddings and I found that half of them were no longer married. So, before the book was produced it became historical. It never came out though.” He further talked about his latest book, “India at home doesn’t suffer from this problem because it is already a historical book.
It is a book which does not talk about Mr A or Mrs B or the family. It is about how India lives at the beginning of the 21st century. It isn’t about who’s who homes, rather about what’s left out in between, the homes which are not counted. The subject of this book happen to me quite by chance, having done two public books like The Monumental India and The Sacred India. The materials in these two books are such that one can find it easily accessible through the medium of internet. But one cannot google a home. For a start, I was working with Aga Khan Foundation and during those days, I went to the sarpanch’s house and photographed the sarpanch in his charpai with his wife and utensils. I did this picture and it instantly clicked me with a project idea around this since it is away from the public eye. Interestingly enough when I contacted that family again for the photo caption, I found that I was mistaken. It was the sarpanch and her husband whom I captured in my frame.”
Talking about the selection of pictures for his book, he says, “It was spontaneous because I didn’t want to operate from a list at all. If I had followed from a prospective of people oriented then we would have a lot of Marwaris in the book. I didn’t want to make it architectural because that would have been a very narrow way of looking at it. So, it all came down to the questions I asked to the number of homes that I got to. I constantly avoided words like ‘spectacular’, ‘unusual’ because this would bring me to a home that I knew I would get it anyway. I wanted to find the ordinary. I wanted to find the relationship, attachment and detachment. At the end what please me the most is the wide range of emotions and moods it carries. And it is not born out of a single thought; I progressed as I moved along this book.”In the sarpanch’s photograph, one can see the multitudes of steel utensils lining the walls testifying family’s relative prosperity. The pots and utensils seem to be mostly new- still bearing shop stickers or encased in veils of plastic sheeting- and are for display rather than use. Sarpanch’s home where the sarpanch is the lady. Her posture in the photograph reflects the confidence her council position provides, for it is unusual for a woman of her social mileau to be photographed thus, reclining beside her husband as an equal. “Many pots and utensils were part of the dowries at the couple’s two sons received at their weddings, along with trucks, furniture, cash and two-wheelers,” adds Amit. He has managed to cover 22 states and two union territories in his book. “The closest thing I found to my book travelling all over my country is when you build a home in India, it takes a long time. Well, this was my building of India at my home. It is the third panoramic book I have done. And it also happens to be the third pan India book,” he says candidly. There are other two books in his pipeline. One on the lesser known monuments of India and the other one revolves around dualities within us. It looks at two aspects of every being.
Glancing at another photograph from his book which captures the live of a snake catcher in the town of Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh is another beautiful piece which has much to tell. The snake catcher is pictured with his sister and their younger siblings. He catches and defangs the snakes and keeps them in a plastic box. The combined income of the family is in between Rs 3000- 4000. This just about feeds the family of eleven. However, the family is a happy one. India at Home took eight years altogether. “There is a photographer friend of mine who started shooting in the morning, worked 20 hours and at the end of the day he produced a book,” says Amit wondering if he could also do the same. The book ends with the photograph of two unassuming graves lying in an austere crypt at the Taj Mahal directly beneath the more grand faux graves on the plinth above. The Mughal practice of building false graves in imperial tombs was for the purpose of protecting the real graves from vandals. The crypt is opened to the public only once a year during the death anniversary of Urs(a word that literally translates as wedding, signifying the eternal union of the soul with the beloved) of the Emperor.