‘There is nothing exceptional about the common man’

For a white man to call the average Indian man ‘The Great Unwashed’ is inviting trouble. But French photographer Fabien Charuau, whose very first Indian exhibition is titled that, isn’t one for needless provocation. He is much too reserved for that. In fact, over the past few months, he has earnestly been trying to get over his shyness to be able to communicate with his
audience. The ease with which he poses for the camera and talks about this work at the opening of his exhibition, says his wife, is a revelation.

In India for the last 12 years, Charuau started his career in India, and married and settled down in Mumbai to follow fashion and lifestyle photography. But he still feels an ‘otherness he can’t wish away; an otherness he has accepted and projected on to his subjects in the hope of resolving it. ‘The Great Unwashed’ and ‘Stumble Asleep’ — the dreams of ‘the great unwashed’ currently up on display the Matthieu Foss Gallery, come from this deep divide that is as much within him as it is around. “To me ‘The Great Unwashed’ is a pejorative term, but I want to turn it around through my work and disinvest it of the connotation. In fact, I want to put the common man on a pedestal,” he says. For a class represented for its poverty, depravation and struggle, “what was important to me was to know their normality.” He reacts to the stereotype of them being exceptional, when to him they are really the average, “the socio-political, cultural and economic core of the country.”

In the last year-and-a-half spent travelling through mofussil India in tracking the everyday lives of men from the lower middle class, he hopes he has managed to bridge a bit of the gap. ‘The Great
Unwashed’ is about the body of the Indian man in tangle of everyday touches and exchanges, of which Charuau is a part. Yet, his photographs are not about crowds, but individuals in their day-to-day in whom he seeks the same visual language as does in his models. “I am fascinated by the body of Indian men, its sensuousness and grace, the way they dress, the way they use their fingers, their wrists. Their body language is open; nothing much hidden there. They are not conscious or gathered or miser about the energy they have,” he says. He interprets a picture of two wrestlers at a kushti akhara in Kolhapur as a representation the violence and gentleness of the touches he has experienced — “you know, how you get pushed around when getting on to a train and then you sit next to each other like nothing has happened?”
In ‘Stumble Asleep’, he has dreamed up the dreams of the great unwashed, and arranged them to suit a personal narrative. All pictures in the series try to recreate either stories he has heard from friends or his distant attempts at getting into the subject’s mind. Some pictures clicked themselves; Charuau had no clue why he took them until he saw the thumbnail prints later — like the picture of a girl sitting alone outside a cinema hall was actually a visual memory of an scene from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. “It is not reality; it’s distortion. It is actually a projection of my dreams on my subjects,” he says. The narrative too is subconscious, a visual equivalent of automatic writing. Strung together over three whiskeys, he let his narrative be led by the jumble of stories he’s believed.

The exhibition is on at the Matthieu Foss Gallery, Ballard Estate, till September 30. Visit www.matthieufossgallery.com