starting something new

SA_32, originally uploaded by scoopneil.

For the past eight years, my creative efforts in photography have centered around my interest in exploring my Indian heratige. Last summer I spent six weeks in Mumbai, photographing casual laborers on the streets. While a new Indian middle class enjoys the fruits of a recent economic revolution, there remain those who make their living by providing simple services on the streets for a few rupees. One can get a shave and haircut on almost any street corner in India for 30 rs. (about 40 cents). There are plenty of cobblers, earwax cleaners, fortune-tellers, shoe shiners, umbrella fixers, bicycle mechanics, tire repairmen, pan vendors, as well as legions of small street stalls selling every imaginable item at rock bottom prices. These vendors in this informal street economy endure heat, dust, and police harassment as they sell their services and wares in makeshift stalls or hard fought patches of sidewalk, and often spend their nights sleeping in the same places. These casual laborers still make up a large part of India’s economy, but they are ignored by the legions of pedestrians, until the bargains they offer are just too good to pass up, and then a sudden evening crowd gathers, jostling for space, fingering the goods, and driving hard bargains that enable the vendor to eat another day. I hope that my portraits will enable viewers to take another look and notice these often ignored individuals.

The next chapter of my own experience during the summer of 2009, would bring me to Islin, New Jersey and Jackson Heights, Queens, NY. Forty years ago, my father made the journey from India to Great Britain, where he finished college and married my mother, then to the United States, with my infant self in tow. In this country he made a new and very different life from the one in which he grew up. At that time, there was no Little India within an American city or town, and my father had left his friends and fellow countrymen behind, to start a new family without the comfort of any reminders from his own culture. This experience has changed for newer immigrants, as within the last 20 years, Indian enclaves have formed, which create a community assists those who have newly arrived in the United States, and provide a cultural continuity and familiarity to the South Asian Diaspora.

With this new body of work, I focus on the workers who have traveled from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to the South Asian ethnic enclaves in New York and New Jersey that make up “Little India.” Here I met many South Asian people who have created a life in a new country. Having had to give up familiar customs, friends, family and country for a chance at what they dream will be a better life, people in these areas have created a new community for themselves, adapting the customs they left behind to life in a new climate and country. I want to make portraits of these people as they work and live in this new environment, creating their own history and traditions in an adopted land. I can’t help but wonder how life for my own family would have been different, had such a community been available when we made the same journey.