In 2003, I left the UK for India to follow a story about the dwindling number of snake charmers. I was gone for eight years. As anyone who has been will know, India can sweep you up like that. And everything about India got under my skin: it's history, people, light, colours, contradictions and complexities. At that time, it was also a society that was changing at breakneck speed: after decades of stagnation it was suddenly seeing wild economic growth and, with it, a huge surge in confidence.
In Delhi, where I set up base, a new mall, nightclub or restaurant seemed to be opening every week. The new affluence in the big cities threw into stark relief the distinctions between the educated and the have-nots; the migrant workers, the slum-dwellers and the rural poor. As a visual storyteller, it was fertile, intoxicating, and addictive terrain.
In those eight years I travelled the length and breadth of the country and the region, seeking to shed light on a profusion of unsettling juxtapositions—hope, adversity, grit, pluck, zeal, and fanaticism.
You can see it in the eyes of the hundreds of penniless Bihari young men as they crammed in to study for entry to one of India’s elite universities, their equivalent of a moonshot. You can see it in the level of discipline insisted upon by the army general fighting the Naxalites-in India’s little-chronicled jungle war—so absolute even the street dogs have been drilled into carefully choreographed manoeuvres. You can glimpse it in the almost-inscrutable, forever-swollen faces of the victims of dowry acid-attacks as they coiffe and sculpt the looks of the Pakistani elite. The defiance of the entrepreneurs in the tanneries of the Dharavi slum, their unflinching gaze almost daring you to objectify them. In the living, breathing, kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt of Sufi-infused Islam, as thousands bowed down as one for Friday prayers at the mosque in Srinagar at the height of the 2008 uprising there. In a young woman’s life extinguished in the tsunami, her lustrous hair and iridescent sari blouse the only remnants of her vivacity.
On assignment for titles ranging from COLORS Magazine and the once celebrated Independent’s Saturday Magazine, I covered stories on the human-hair trade, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the riddle of a village with bizarre numbers of identical twins, Hindu Sadhus hashish use at the Kumbh Mela. And the snake charmers story, of course.
My time in those lands—and the friendships, experiences and encounters I had—left me forever and utterly changed.
