The whole picture

A middle-aged couple reclines on a rope charpoy in the middle of a room, leaning casually back on thin pillows. She wears a blue printed cotton sari – cheap and well-washed. He is resplendent in white dhoti and kurta, a turban on his proud head. Behind them, the paint on the once-dun wall is peeling, but what catches the eye is a neat array of gleaming steel plates, bowls, glasses, dechis, cans, etc, arranged on open wooden racks along one wall – an installation worthy of Subodh Gupta!

Amit Pasricha photographed Champaben and Hargovan Prajapati, residents of Ismailpur, a hamlet in north Gujarat, some 10 years ago. And it's these utensils displayed in their home that set off the photo-documentary project that's culminated in this book, India At Home.

Pasricha is arguably best known for his panoramic photographs i.e. near-360 degree images of Indian monuments and teeming street scenes; The Monumental India Book and The Sacred India Book, two compilations of his photographs, have won several awards in India and abroad. But until India At Home, he hadn't thought to apply the technique – the panoramic image is made by digitally stitching together a series of images – to the confined interiors of a home. The photograph of the Prajapatis' home, however, opened his eyes. "Here it was creating inter-relations between so many things, with the result that so many stories were coming out, revealing the context of so many things," he says reflectively.

The results, as evident in the 100 or so images that finally made it to the book, make India At Home a broad visual archive, a sociological study of how contemporary India lives, with representative images from east, west, north and south; rich, poor and middle-class; occupations, religious beliefs, etc. Indeed, as Pasricha acknowledges, "I look at myself as a chronicler, far more than a creator."

Thus, on the one hand, there's the tastefully plush, modern home of an antiques dealer in Kochi, decorated with traditional furniture, wooden pillars and antiques got from crumbling mansions across Kerala; on the other is the grass-matting hut of the nomadic herder tribes who live in Kutch's Banni grasslands along the Indo-Pak border. There's an 8'x8' chawl in Mumbai which serves as combined bedroom, kitchen and living room for the family of four that lives here; and also the "he and she" houses (dormitories for boys and girls) of the Poumai Naga tribals in remote Liyai Khullen village in Manipur. Then you have the octagon-shaped dressing-room in a 400-year-old palace of Prince Laskyaraj Singh Mewar of Udaipur, with its open cupboard showcasing a colourful collection of 200 Crocs; and the streetside shanty made of discarded Flex posters that Delhi's Pratima Devi shares with 200 street dogs whom she feeds, grooms, gets vaccinated and nurses when sick.

But it's not the documentary aspect of the images that'll make you pause over them, wonder about the tantalising half glimpses of the inner lives of the people who inhabit the spaces – their loves, hopes and fears, their histories, heritage and future aspirations. "There is a certain 'performance' about being photographed inside your home that I was very conscious of and wanted to avoid. So I'd tell the people in the homes I went to to be themselves, to wear whatever they wanted to, to do what they wanted," says Pasricha.       

The results are quite startling. At a century-old bonedi bari (aristocratic home) in Kolkata, for instance, the women chose to photograph themselves in the formal drawing room decked out in their rich, Bengal cotton saris, while the man of the house appears in rumpled inner vest and pyjamas. In Bangalore, a yoga teacher sits on the Afghan rug of her living room, legs aloft, spread wide apart in merudandasana, while in Salcete, Goa the artist Shashi D'Costa is photographed inside his quirky bathroom, wearing only a torn gamcha.

But most intriguing is the image of Laitonjam Kiran Singh sitting on an old-fashioned four-poster bed, leaning against a vivid pink-fuchsia mosquito-net with his arm cosily draped around two pretty women. There's another, modern and bare bed in the room and you notice a wooden partition covered with clothes. They are his two wives, the caption says, adding that Laitonjam has a three-day rotation sleeping system between the two women with whom he has five children. "He's a peon in the Manipur government and was most eager that I should come home and photograph him and his wives. He's absolutely matter-of-fact about his two marriages and even the women, going by the photograph, seem happy enough," laughs Pasricha.
India at Home

Amit Pasricha (Text: Bharati Motwani)
Publisher: Panoramic
Price: Rs 10,000