SLEEPING IN THE FOREST

A considerable part of my practice navigates history, memory, and the passage of time. My concerns revolve around some of the vexations that arise from the remnants of India’s colonial past, the days of the British Raj. I’m interested especially in those aspects with which I am connected personally: The Last Steam Trains (1999-2003), The Anglo-Indians (2004-2006), and What Was Home (2007-2010, boarding schools from the British period). Sleeping in the Forest has evolved from the same site of enquiry. This project is about British “dak bungalows” or rest houses built to oversee the Himalayan forests in the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in northern India.

As a child in the 1970s I'd accompany my father, a government official, on his travels to remote dak bungalows in Uttarakhand. So, when I started photographing these bungalows, they were already a part of my memory. On one such journey, I reached a bungalow late in the evening. It was a revelation to see the scene lit up by the light of the moon. There was something mysterious about the light and the inexplicable shadows that enveloped the scene. That is when I made my first photographs in moonlight. From then on, I trailed the full moon, along the forests of these mountains, photographing at night. 

My encounter with the forest has always been one that of fear and fascination. Over the years, I have spent several nights looking at the forest, which has a tendency to overwhelm me, an outsider, to whom it seemed like a dark, impregnable maze. A stifled air of foreboding would hang over the beauty of the scene. I began to make photographs of the forest from the clearing of the bungalow. It took me some time to muster up courage to venture into the forest, to make photographs from within. It is a humbling experience to be in a remote Himalayan forest away from all but traces of civilisation. The forest that I routinely walked through during the day became unassailable when swathed by the moonlit night.

Sleeping in the Forest invites others to share my experiences: not only through all that is built and natural within the landscape (the external), but also the one that allowed my solitary self to reflect (the internal). The history of this external environment vis-à-vis human intervention is as old as colonialism itself. These dak bungalows are reminiscent of some of the oldest civilisational conflicts that posit human beings simultaneously with and against nature. The forests that I experienced seemed to be part of the imperial project – these are not natural forests, but monoculture plantations to be used as timber. It thereby presents us with an inherent dilemma – are we destroying the natural forms by way of scientifically managing forests?

Besides its complex history rooted in colonial administration and symbolised by bungalows in the clearings, contemporary human presence or intrusions in these spaces take the shape of narrow long-winding paths and sporadic streaks of light carried by passersby at night. The underlying idea behind the current body of work therefore is to problematize the otherwise very unassuming relationship between humans and nature, especially when the latter forces you to pause and notice it in all its awe.