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Leading still-life photographer essaying Indian migration
Thursday December 27, 2012 01:22:17 PM,
IANS
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Photographer Pablo Bartholomew's
chronicle of Kolkata of the 1970s |
New Delhi: The hybrid life of migrant Indians,
their longing to connect to their homeland and their histories
have been translating themselves into narrative photo-essays in
veteran photographer Pablo Bartholomew's lens for the last two
years.
The photographer, son of pioneering lensman Richard Bartholomew,
is working on a photographic chronicle of the lives of the
migrants and descendants of indentured labourers who left the
country between the early 19th and early 20th centuries - driven
by economic compulsions of changing world orders - to seek better
livelihoods.
"I was recently in Leicester (in Britain) photographing Indians
thrown out of Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin between
1972-1974. They have been living in pockets of Leicester for the
last 40 years and have since started their own businesses selling
traditional lifestyle wares like saris, jewellery and food.
Leicester has nearly 40 shops selling Indian products,"
Bartholomew told IANS, explaining his project at the Art Heritage
Gallery here owned by the Ebrahim Alkazi Foundation.
Records show that nearly 60,000 Asians were thrown out of Uganda
by Idi Amin.
"I cannot call them the diaspora. For me they are 'Lesterwallah'.
They made Uganda their home and were thrown out. Many of them
tried to come back to India but could not return. They could enter
Britain because they had British passports... And were put into
camps because there was no place for them as the British
government indicated," the lensman recalled.
In 2009, the photographer turned his lens on the emgires of Indian
origin in France's Reunion Island and Mauritius.
"I received money from a museum in Paris to document the lives of
the indentured Indian labourers in the three former French island
dominions," Bartholomew said. He spent six months in France.
Earlier, Bartholomew had photographed Indian migrants in the
tri-state of the American east coast - New York, New Jersey and
Connecticut that have sizeable populations of Indian origin.
Bartholomew said he was "probing at the idea that when people
migrate, what they retain and what they annihilate or lose".
The Indian settlements abroad are like "mini India with everyone
busy imprinting their family history", Bartholomew said.
The photographer is on his way to Portugal to look at its Goan
connection after the state was liberated by India in 1961.
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