To be Shadharon means to be ordinary. We are ordinary people, my grandmother says, with a hint of defiance. We are not of those who achieve fame or notoriety; we keep our head down, work for a reasonable wage, live in a reasonable neighbourhood, eat reasonable food, marry reasonable people; have children and grandchildren. But Kolkata, the city of my birth, is both famed and notorious. It was a city of colonial splendour - the jewel in the crown of Empire. It then became a poster child for post-colonial disaster - full of the poor and the unwanted.
It is also where we live, keeping our head down defiantly, neither glorious nor wretched, but terrified.

An ongoing project taking shape through photographs, research into Kolkata’s histories, and working with the artist’s own family story, Shadharon brings together a complicated narrative that focuses on the city’s middle-class, Hindu, upper-caste populations, those who conform unquestioningly to agreed upon values of the society they inhabit. The artist’s maternal family have lived in Kolkata for over a century, and this project looks at how conformity and ordinariness are in fact facades, whose maintenance rests on cruelty as well as sacrifice of individual and collective beings.

Shadharon is a project that is full of questions. How does experience crystallise into images, and from images into an imagination possessing currency? Whose experiences are included, who’s excluded, which images remain, and which disappear? Whose imagination does the city reflect and how do alternate visions disturb or challenge it? How much power does the imagined city have on its actual brick and mortar; in moulding its streets and its homes, its businesses and its policies, its physicality, its form, and its people? How does a city imagine itself through units of neighbourhoods, communities, families and individuals, and what forms does power take as it flits through the dimensions of space, time, and experience?