(photo from The Indian Memory Project by Anusha Yadav)Of all the innumerable social rites that make up domestic lives, the ritual viewing of old photographs is particularly intriguing. The family, which exists to fulfil the principle of forward continuity, finds an odd antithesis in its attempt to derive meaning from a lost past, hoping it will somehow illuminate the present.
Being the only material remnants of a forgotten time, old family photos evoke a strange sort of nostalgia, a word that, etymologically, signifies a return home, a desire to relive what was once fondly experienced. However, the way nostalgia is experienced today isn’t restorative, but an attempt to savour the distance between a past malleable to our imaginations and our present, which is frustratingly certain.
Anusha Yadav, photographer and founder of The Indian Memory Project, an online archive of photos from pre-90s India, is a self-described photo time-traveller. “If I had a time machine, I’d go to Akbar’s court with my Mac and show him all the cool things he could do with it!” she laughs, “But old photos are all that we have. It gives you a glimpse of a time when life was different, the pace was different.”
Being products of an unthinking point-and-click culture, today’s generation is naturally curious about old photos, which are telling in their deliberate intent. Their careful iconography, displaying visible markers of class, caste, prosperity and progeny, reveal a clearly identifiable lineage. But while photos present an objective truth, their in-built narratives, shaped by a rich oral tradition, are what give them a charming complexity. A contributor to Yadav’s project, web and animation consultant Shubhodeep Das is the only child of Pradip Kumar Das, the youngest of seven brothers, seen in the photo (top) taken on the terrace of their childhood house in Shyambazar, Kolkata, in 1943. The photo appears to be a proud declaration of male-bearing fertility. But Das reveals that his grandparents tried very long to have a daughter but failed. The terrace shot immediately tells a different story, one marked by absence and longing.
A photo only speaks when we ask questions of it, says Sujith Parayil, assistant professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, TISS. While the surface connection is usually emotional, photos speak to us within far richer contexts, he says. “You experience nostalgia when you connect something evaporated from the present with its presence in the past,” he says. Another Memory Project contributor, Geetali Tare, sent in a photo of CK Nayudu, India's first Test captain. The faded black & white photo is of an intense-looking man in regal military garb, who stares at us commandingly. With no immediate sense of kinship, Tare still finds the photo captivating, displaying as she says, a period when playing a sport for one’s country was an act of defiance. “We worship mediocre, over-paid, over-weight sportsmen today, completely forgetting those gone by; sportsmen for whom playing for the country was a personal credo, not just an opportunity to spin money,” she observes.
As contributions to her project keep pouring in, Yadav links them to an interesting trend she’s been observing on social networking websites, where people are uploading old photos of their childhood or their ancestors. Yadav sees it as an indication of people seeking an escape from the constant struggle of keeping up with the modern world. “We’re well on our way to living fast-paced digital lives, and uploading old photos online is one way to stay in touch with our roots,” she says.
The plight of the modern subject in Western thought can conventionally be traced to modernity’s willful negation of tradition. However, as Parayil points out, Indian modernity is unique. “Our modernity has always tried to relocate tradition. We undergo a continuous process of remordernisation in a way that tradition is perhaps devalued, but never rejected.”
