NEIGHBOURHOOD
a paean to golden winter mornings in colaba, bombay - my erstwhile neighbourhood - and to fascinating protagonists of a perpetually-unfolding neorealist plot
‘neighbourhood’ is at once a paean to mornings in colaba, the charming heart of historic bombay that i called home for four years, and an unpacking of the term itself: that is, the quality of being a neighbour. the photographs shown here represent a rarely-seen – and perhaps even rarer-considered – side of south bombay, where for a brief half hour of sunrise each day, a whole cast of actors and their inanimate counterparts take centrestage, interacting with each other with special richness.
dawn, and the specific filmic quality of its light, has for me always been a subject of intense fascination. in the sliver of liminal space between the private, domestic night and the public, urban day, conventional social relationships hang back, and tender forms of interactions play out between individuals, objects, and spaces. the itinerant shoe polisher, with his compact briefcase of brushes and vials, appears in the morning glow a businessperson stepping out of the taj; the dust kicked up by the road sweeper, again in cahoots with the golden light, transforms the street into a mythic mist-shrouded ink landscape; the itinerant idliwala walks briskly towards work on mereweather road, if only to keep pace with his customers doing exactly just that. glazed by the low, maltose rays of sunlight, colaba’s before-hours community becomes fascinating protagonists of a perpetually unfolding neorealist plot: the illuminative power of light blurs the boundary between documentary and staged cinematography.
but veiled in the placid aesthetics of these images also are trickier, more complex questions around india’s urban realities. animated by an enduring interest in the fraught and culturally productive intersections of labour, identity, and social relations, my camera is a means of investigating early morning colaba’s – and its pavement-pounding populace’s – place in the broader commercial machinery of mumbai. from the chatty policeman trio strolling astride before their first firm-faced patrol of the day, to the young tourist vehicle driver waiting for passengers he will narrate facts about his old city to, to the lottery ticketbook perched gingerly on the joyden mansion fence, undoubtedly left there by someone other than the tony colonial building’s residents: it is these very contradictory tensions that reveal how we come to fashion our own contentious identities within our space, and our place, today.
the photographs here are intentionally diminutive in format, a reflection not only of my chosen ethnographic instrument – the phone camera – but also of the blink-and-miss vignettes depicted in my photography. in a city of the omnipresent billboard, these pieces are a quiet statement on the fullness and sufficiency of our everyday realities, no matter how brief or quotidian they may be to the naked eye.
