In this project I am both outsider and insider. As a foreigner, I travelled to India and found an unfamiliar place. Yet as part of the Indian diaspora, my trip was a return of sorts: I was invited to dinners, introduced to relatives, and visited my family’s ancestral home.
Rampur is a small city with the highest Muslim population in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and poorest state. Under British rule, it was a Rohilla Pathan Princely state ruled by a Nawab. In the 1930s, the Nawab sent my grandfather, his physician, to London to continue his medical education. My father was born in London, and I in Boston.
I started photographing this project in 2019, and later returned in 2022. I see myself as both an insider and outsider, and I selected these photographs to emphasize the contrast between interior and exterior space. Many of the homes in Rampur consist of a courtyard surrounded by four walls with bedrooms and a kitchen. Multigenerational families live together inside these enclaves.
Half of these photographs focus on the intimacy of home, and those who have let their guard down in this personal, familial sphere. The rest of the photographs show Rampur’s public space: the street, alleyways, a crumbling palace.
When I first began taking photographs of Rampur my intention was to learn about the city and its residents. Now, my motives may be more complex as I think about my own relationship to this foreign place.
