At one of Delhi’s many unauthorised colonies, noted photographer Chitvan Gill captures the triumph of human spirit over devastating odds
The remark that one’s face mirrors one’s psyche, is a commonplace that is partly true. A visage reflects not the entire psyche but its broad contours as well as the changes wrought by its evolving interaction with the changing social, cultural and economic milieux of its time. The haunted eyes of one who has been through riots, civil wars, wars and/or profound personal tragedies, the resigned and long-suffering look of the very poor, the glowing visage of a batsman who has scored a century… all tell, in the broadest of strokes, the story both of a momentary response and the nature of one’s long haul through life.
In Steve McCurry’s photograph, Sharbat Gul’s face, which became almost that of the Afghan War following its publication on the cover of the National Geographic Magazine of June, 1985, seemed to reflect the teenagers intense, bottled-up anger. It was obviously the result of what she had suffered during the fighting, which killed her parents, her escape to Pakistan with her brothers, and in the crowded refugee camp in Pakistan where they had found shelter. Its intensity was perhaps all the greater because she had kept her feelings locked within herself for fear of the retribution that venting it might fetch.
McCurry again photographed her in 2002. Now married and the mother three, but still dogged by danger, hardship and fear, her face seemed to suggest, besides a hint of puzzlement over the attention being heaped on her and apprehension about the possible consequences, the subsidence of her intense, searing anger into a deep, sub-surface resentment tempered by a feeling of resignation to the inevitable.
There are many other examples of faces with histories — though not as searing as Sharbat Gul’s. Several of them, each with its own history, were on display at Chitvan Gill’s recent exhibition entitled Buland Masjid: No Grass in the Ghetto, at the basement art gallery at the India International Centre’s Annexe. It is a moving documentary, in photographs and words, of what she calls, life in “all its rawness” in a complex of “slums, shanties, landfills and precarious tenements rising unsteadily towards the sky….”, inhabited mainly by migrants in search of livelihood.
One of Delhi’s more than 1,639 “unauthorized colonies”, Buland Masjid, is, to quote Gill again, “a ramshackle cobbling together of disparate tenements huddled together — the homes of men, women and children, living, loving and dying in the city. These are the entrails of India's capital, where people have created, out of a bleak wasteland, a place they call home. Bare hands have fashioned the sad leavings of the river, pummeled the peat and bog of the marshland into dwellings that literally grew out of the land.”
Yet, it is not a landscape of misery and defeat. As Gill puts it, “This is, on first sight, a world of slums and squalor, where pigeonhole dwellings hold dark secrets close to their hearts. Yet, what one encounters is a world of Almadovarian excess. life, laughter and madness spill out into the maze of streets and gallis. There is tragedy here, and there is triumph.”
It is, therefore, not surprising that Gill’s narrative showed not just individual faces mirroring their unique preferences and personalities — hairstyles, for example — but the community’s collective life in all its dimensions, from culinary preferences and availability to quotidian interfaces and unrelenting and uncertain struggle for survival reduced to its resigned acceptance as a fact of daily life.
It could not have been easy to do all this; the danger of going overboard with sentimentality was considerable. Gill, however, has done it with remarkable virtuosity and balance, leaving one at the end with yet another awed realisation of the resilience of the human spirit coping constantly with abject poverty and a dehumanising environment without losing its elan and zest for life. But this is hardly surprising given her standing as a film-maker and documentary photographer, with extensive work on social and developmental issues, urbanisation and urban culture.