Home, where are you? (2024 - Ongoing)

In 2022, after years of spending time in Canada, I decided to move to West Bengal, India.

Living in Canada, I would reminisce about the Bengal of my childhood, the ghost stories, the folklores of palaces, the coconut trees that would shimmer in the moonlight that could be seen from my grandparents’ house. I would remember the scenes on these greeting cards that my mother would send to her sisters every year when I was very little.

As life changed, we left Bengal and never came back to live there. Over the years, we would visit from time to time, and the memories remained vague; some, I am sure, made up just from the films and literature about the place.

After living in the West and delving into photography, I also understood the problematic colonial gaze, which was reductive and never painted India, or Bengal, in its fullness, with all the context.

Bengal, as a region, has gone through famines, partition, and displacements, all induced by the British Imperial rule. There is a lot of collective trauma that this region is still recovering from, but amidst all that pain and suffering, there is also the beauty and hope that I found in remote villages, where if you stopped and breathed, you could still go back in time.

This project is my attempt to find the home that has only existed in my imagination, of made-up and real memories of childhood, of summer school holidays when children’s films would play on TV every afternoon, when nothing had gone wrong yet. This work is also about reclaiming what’s left of Bengal and knowing one day the place will heal again.