A macaque is busy grooming a young one on a wall in the bylanes of West Marredpally, unaffected by the human activity around, their counterparts meanwhile are enjoying a siesta at the balcony of an independent house on a warm, summer afternoon. One of them is also trying to guard a cat, the other is using an electric wire to cross a busy road. Author, photographer and researcher Pankaj Sekhsaria offers a rare window into the everyday life of a macaque in the city through his photography series ‘The River and the Macaque: Nature of the city’.
His enriching perspective of the normalcy of their existence is also complemented by social commentary; in a brief section one finds layers of human negligence and greed that he taps to show how messy our cities have become. These are images from the Yamuna river, its filth, but you can’t say if it’s any less similar to our very own Musi, Pankaj points out.
“Secunderabad has been my area of work for two decades now, wildlife has been of significant interest to me. I enjoy photography too. You don’t really have to try hard to capture the macaques in our part of the world, they are all around and formed interesting subjects, so it wasn’t hard work. I’ve taken the most photographs from this series through the windows and balconies,” Pankaj adds. That wildlife isn’t really associated with urban lifestyle and yet forms a significant aspect of our lives, piqued Pankaj’s interests. The series left him with a few questions too, of the origin of the macaques in the city, the reason behind their big numbers; questions that viewers of the exhibition have consistently asked him.
How photographer-friendly are macaques? “Quite a lot. Wildlife photography is about the time you spend with them, observing them. Here are animals who’re absolutely not scared of humans, unlike those in dense forests that tend to be shy and run away from human activity. Most of my pictures have been taken from 20-30 feet. It was just about having a camera, some patience to spot them when they are around.” He particularly remembers the picture of the macacque holding a cat, it was something he observed over a 10-day span, it was interesting for him to see that side of a macaque.
The issues of waste management in rivers and macacques for a photography exhibition may not seem an ideal blend on paper, but Pankaj insists the issues complement each other. “The title of the exhibition had a small word play in it, it’s as much ‘nature in the city’ as it is ‘nature of the city’. Nature exists in different forms in cities. The images of macaques and the river could have been any city. The idea is to make us think what our cities are.” Nature is in the background, the human object is in the foreground for the series of Yamuna, while it works vice-versa for the macaques. (‘The River and the Macaque: Nature of the City’ is on at Goethe Zentrum, Banjara Hills till April 24)
