Inhabiting the periphery


When the new economic policies were envisioned after the independence of India, they focused on developing the rural parts of the country, benefiting from their natural resources that would eventually boost the growth of the newly born country. A change that began with the nationalisation of power, steel, coal, mining and other sectors took a liberal turn during the early 1990s, inducing their privatisation.

Including other places in the country, parts of Central India that used to be mainly agricultural lands and forests were transformed with the rise of new industries. The roads soon populated with trucks ferrying industrial materials, and residual ashes filled the lands. The purity of air was exchanged for black dust.

During the late 1980s, my parents moved to Tilda, a town in Chhattisgarh (earlier Madhya Pradesh), to work as teachers at the sole college on its outskirts. The surrounding terrains with vast open skies, and quaint nature, left a strong imprint in my earliest memories and experience of the place.

But towns like Tilda never had a hopeful future, nor were they cared for. Though the industries would create jobs that were a necessity, the majority of them were not well-paid and exploitative. It eventually resulted in the migration of young people to other cities and states in the hope of a better life including myself.

In 2017, I began taking pictures in the town with a sense of estrangement and looking back for a closeness to home (or a resolution for the inevitable migration). On each return, more than the life inside the town, its peripheries were strongly evident of relentless change, and where consequences are felt most acutely. 

The overlooked spaces, and places of marginal nature, as documents, reminisce the same vision of a modern India where now surface the frailty of crumbling rural landscapes. The way these wires on the newly established poles cut the skies into several pieces, resembles an essence of belonging scattered in grace and resilience.