“That’s my house — the one in the middle,” professor Ar. Zoyab A. Kadi points to a photo of a narrow street packed with century-old houses on either side. “Usually, these houses have very little space between them. There is no privacy. But then, again, there was not much need in those times. Most Bohra families were into trade, and the men would be travelling to other countries for most part of the year. Meanwhile, the women would manage the house,” recalls Zoyab, who was just three years old when his family shifted from Sidhpur, a small colourful town in Gujarat, to Chennai.
Zoyab was among those who attended the launch of photographer Sebastian Cortes’ exhibition, ‘Sidhpur: Time Present Time Past’ hosted by Tasveer. Cortes, walking the audience through his photos (taken between March 22 and April 30, 2015), quite unabashedly says, “I am always curious to find out what happens in the privacy of others’ homes.” When Cortes first landed in Sidhpur (for a magazine story), it seemed like a slice out of Paris and London for him. “Naturally, I wanted to know what was behind the walls,” he says.
So he set out, asking the Bohra women for permission to set his camera inside their drawing rooms, kitchen and, sometimes, even bedrooms. “Once when I entered a house for the shoot, a woman asked me if I wanted to see her bedroom,” he laughs. Cortes followed her to a spacious bedroom on the first floor. While he set his camera to get the lighting right, and all the elements in, the woman narrated her stories, and sat in front of him, lost in thought. “I never meant to have her in the composition, but she just fit in. Now, the photo is not about the bed or the bedroom, but the woman,” he says.
Most of the pictures, he says, are not what he really would have wanted, but what developed in front of him. He recounts examples — “I wanted to photograph an empty room, and suddenly, a little boy appeared, dressed regally, and reclined on the bed like he was the owner of the house. I realised that my picture looked better with him in it. Yet another time, I wanted to photograph the staircase inside a house, and while I was at it, the domestic help of the house walked back and forth, so I decided to capture her in the shot; she became a brush stroke in the frame,” he says.
While the houses remain immortalised in Cortes’ photographs, there is no guarantee that they would survive the tide of time and progress. “It is tough to maintain these houses,” says Zoyab, who has now rented out his house. Most of the families, he says, moved out post-Independence in search of better opportunities, and the houses remain empty for most part of the year. Roshan Hararwala, who shifted from Sidhpur to Chennai in 1962, and whose house also finds place in one of Cortes’ photos, says he spent a fortune renovating his house last year. Ten years from now, no one knows whether these will even exist, they say. “Progress is dangerous,” sighs Cortes. The photos are an attempt to capture the architecture and landscapes that are in peril.
(The exhibition, a collateral event of The Hindu Lit For Life, is on till January 31, at The Folly, Amethyst.)
