Chinari
Through drizzle and impenetrable fog, I became a part of the lives of the people I spent my days with. I travelled from one village to another, living with families who welcomed me into their homes and offered me food and shelter. As I spent more time in this place, my understanding about the Gorkha community as well as the Gorkhaland movement began to change. I began to realise that the fight for Gorkhaland is not merely a demand for territory - its roots lie far deeper. It is essentially a fight for social identity. I sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced pine forests to produce the world’s finest tea; and a demand for statehood which was almost a 100 years old.
In the enmeshed lives of the people I photographed—of various castes, tribes, religions, and cultures—lived at the measured pace of a small town, I discovered a society which managed to endure even under threat from cynical politics and a fading identity. With this work I have tried to look at the notion of identity and the sense of uncertainty in everyday life, merging memory with politics, to create a portrait of a place and its people.
