The Aryavarth Express
Agency (New Delhi): A woman laughing uninhibitedly, her head thrown back, hair fanning about her. Two women lolling by the river enjoying an unguarded moment. A girl clutching a lap top in a starch cottage. Kalbelia dancers from Rajasthan applying makeup on their faces.
What Deepti Asthana wants to document through these photographs are not snapshots of rural India, but rather stories of its people. She wants to tell the story of the girls in Uttarakhand who spend hours fetching water every day, which impact their education and health.
She wants to tell the stories of the elderly women who are fighting to save the rivers and Mountains of their villages even though they are getting too old to take care of themselves or ever enjoy the fruits of their labour. She wants to tell the story of the two women forest guards struggling in a male dominated field, one a widow and the other having suffered miss carriages.
Asthana — who was recognized as “global talent, Asia 2020” by the World Press Photo and received National Geographical grant in 2022 to document the water crisis in Uttarakhand – says much of her fascination with the lives of women in rural India comes from her own childhood. She grew up in Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. Having lost her father at the age of four, her mother took care of her and her two siblings. The constant threat of being driven out of their house, which belongs to her father’s family, led to a deep sense of insecurity in her, and seeing her mother struggle made her passionate to stories of women like her. She herself was abused by a relative and, as she says , it made her shy and submissive. It took the exposure of living in big cities to restore her self-confidence. “I had to put so much into changing the person that I had become,” she says.
“There is so much of conditioning that when you are coming out of that environment, it takes a lot of energy to fight with yourself and live the life you really want to live.”
That is why the lens she trains on her subjects is such emphatic one. It takes a special kind 0f person to go deep into the lives of rural women and capture the spectrum of their troubles and their triumphs. Because she has gone through it, , she feels she can do justice to those stories. “They ask me whether this is still happening . I tell them that this not what happened 10 or 20 years ago. Women in rural area are still fighting for basic things—for safety, for the right to choose their life partners.”
In many ways, for Asthana, her photography is a response to her own emotional state. Over last few years, she sees her work growing intensely spiritual. During the pandemic, for example, she stayed for three years in Shillong. Living near the forest, she found the isolation to be healing. There, she did a portrait, project for the first time focusing on her own life. It looked at the journey of a woman who wanted to escape social mores, and, and so seeks refuge in the forest. Living close to nature, she learns life lessons that no book could teach. (IPA Service)
By Harihar Swarup