Repressed Memories: A Personal Odyssey (2016-2021)
Repressed Memories was initiated in Chennai at the end of 2016. I was in my twenties, searching for direction and my place in the world. With a borrowed Holga toy camera in my bag, my Enfield took over an hour to escape the city where I had grown up. The heat beat down on my helmet as I weaved through traffic, filtering out noise and inhaling exhaust fumes, an assault on my senses. Finally, I reached a relatively open stretch of highway. With no destination in mind, I followed the east coast route through Tamil Nadu. It was the first of several journeys over six years.
That first day, I arrived somewhere unfamiliar. I passed green paddies where lines of women, their petticoats tucked to the waist, stood knee-deep in brown water tending rice plants. Slowing behind a rocking bullock cart, I almost missed an unmarked carved stone bathing tank built for a long-forgotten princess. Passing through small towns, I observed the vernacular of daily life, including rituals, influences, dilemmas, contrasts, dramas, and dreams. These elements form the fabric from which my identity must have evolved.
Growing up, many of my questions had been suppressed. Issues of caste, gender, and economic disparity were rarely discussed, leaving my understanding of this land incomplete. As I began to photograph, I witnessed farmers weighed down by unspoken struggles, their futures tied to the whims of the land. Migrants moved through unfamiliar streets searching for dignity in work that offered little stability. In quiet workshops, artisans shaped tradition with their hands, each creation becoming a silent act of resistance against the tide of change.
I focused on the subtle interactions between people and their environment. In the quiet loneliness that lingered within these landscapes, I began to confront my own. What started as a photographic journey slowly became something more intimate, an unexpected form of personal therapy. Coming from a difficult upbringing, photography allowed me to face emotions that had long remained buried. Through these journeys and images, I began piecing together fragments of myself, slowly learning how to live with the past rather than escape it.
I had set out as a stranger in my own country, but as I accepted my vulnerability, a feeling shared by many around me, my photographs gradually shifted toward empathy.
While editing, I noticed relationships emerging between specific images and their subjects, which led me to present the work in diptychs and triptychs. The photographs offer clues but no definitive answers to my personal questions. The series, as a whole, attempts to express emotional experience through the reality of the world. Memory is fluid, shaped by time, perspective, and circumstance. These images are not mere records but echoes of lived experience, stories of survival, resistance, and quiet beauty.
Through this work, I continue to explore my place in the world, questioning the past while engaging with the present.