| Ruati Chhangte (Tetei) | Photo Essay |
An essay on seeing the things that one saw a decade ago. From 4 winters in Kashi.
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled…”
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
And now, when I study these photos again, it makes me realize that I had spent my entire time there projecting my suppressed emotions onto everything I saw around me. I didn’t know this at the time, because I was too busy meditating on my aloneness, too busy seeking solitude, too damn busy not talking to anyone around me, even Marm.
People there were not people for me anymore; they had become convenient metaphors playing out this fragmented but strong-felt something that had taken hold of my entire being. Those people—they weren’t all that alone. They had other people around them, people that they were having conversations with, people that they were companionably drinking tea with, taking a walk with. But at the time, I made it a point to seek out those little moments of their life when they could look solitary—for me, for my camera—because that was the only thing I was interested in seeing. Everything around me needed to be punctuated with that quality: alone, solitary, isolated (alone not in a sad lonely way, but in a “hey, I like this, I feel privileged to be alone” way). Somehow that little trick of imposing my emotions onto these images seemed to validate what was going through my head as a normal everyday thing that other people also went through.
What I notice too is that some of the photos that I had taken in Himachal (where I was before I came down to Banaras) have the exact same quality. So yes, for me it is true that places and people that seem entirely different on the outset have a tendency to mirror each other when one wants to draw parallels. I guess its in the nature of things around us….
“I was disturbed by all these minor incompatibilities not only because they struck me as the common denominator of the surrounding area, but because they provided me with an image of my own fate, my own exile in this city; and of course; the projection of my personal history onto the sheer objectiveness of an entire city offered me a certain relief.
I understood that I no more belonged there than did the short streets leading nowhere, streets lined with houses that seemed to come from a different place, and I realized that it was because I did not belong there that it was my true place, in this appalling city of incompatibilities, this city whose relentless grip chained together things foreign to each other.”
The Joke, Milan Kundera
Photos and Text by Ruati Chhangte (Tetei). All Rights Reserved.
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