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Shooting the Indians...

FROM AMERICA One of the pictures mounted in the exhibition

An enthusiastic young Indian photographer goes around in the U.S., particularly in Indian-dominated locations, and shoots pictures. Not only is he viewed with suspicion, but the Indian community he is shooting haggles with him for taking their pictures. They do so not because they feel it is an infringement on their personal and professional lives but because they are in constant fear after 9/11.

This was the experience of Aditya Dhawan, an Indian photographer and a resident of Berkley, California. Dhawan shot the pictures of the Indian community living in Berkley and San Francisco, especially cab drivers and life around Berkley, the streets, lanes, food joints, malls, markets and roads. He exhibited some 81 such photographs at the Visual Art Gallery of the India Habitat Centre. Mukesh Panika, from ArtsAid, a New York-based art foundation, curated the exhibition. The pictures were divided into three categories: Streets of San Francisco, Taxiwallah - An Immigrant Story and Little India. This just-concluded exhibition very subtly captured the loneliness of the Indian community there, as much as it celebrated the grandeur of the malls there.

Some fear

Relates the photographer, "I went to the U.S. in April 2001, four months before 9/11. Therefore, I was witness to the clear and obvious change in the mood of the place post-9/11. One example is the fact that there is a greater insistence, by both the Indian and the Indian American communities, to include certain immigrant communities (such as the cab drivers) in any discussion on the Indian Diaspora. The reason is that they are not considered part of the `Model Indian American Community' with its much publicised success stories. It is also reflective of our own inherent class structures. The post-9/11 environment of fear and caution has only made it worse since every immigrant community feels the need to construct an image of themselves in black and white that would be considered more welcome in America."

Dhawan did have to face certain resistance too.

"There is an atmosphere of fear that surrounds the act of photography in public spaces. Being an Asian, and that too with a goatee, I felt it acutely. The only way I could confront it was by stepping out into those public spaces with my camera," he recalls.

And that's what makes this architect and winner of the Eisner Award in photography think it's high time the Indian American community created its own space in the arts and related media abroad.

RANA SIDDIQUI

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