Mridu Rai

Mridu Rai is an independent writer, curator and researcher. She is the curator of Through Her Lens, a visual research programme in collaboration with Zubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, which aims to expand women photographic practices in the eight Northeast Indian states and Darjeeling Hills. Mridu is an alumna of the University of Arts, London and has worked for many publications including India Today and ARTEM, an independent magazine that looks at North East India the lens of arts. She is also one of the founding members of the Confluence Collective – a group of photographers active in Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalayas. Dipti Tamang, her collaborator on this project, is a faculty member at the Department of Political Science, Darjeeling Government College. She holds a PhD from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and is interested in research on feminist security studies, gender, identities, and regional movements in the Eastern Himalayas. She has recently been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Post-Doctoral Research Grant (2020–2021) to pursue her research on women and conflict in Nagaland and the Darjeeling Hills.

This grant will enable Mridu and Dipti to bring forth alternative narratives from the Darjeeling Himalayas through the stories of people, their lived experiences and cultural practices. Looking beyond the dominant imagery and narratives that continue to reinforce colonial tropes, this project aims to explore the realities of people through extensive archival research, contemporary photography and oral narratives.

Located in the eastern borderlands of India, the Darjeeling Himalayas have a complex colonial history, which continues to define the post-colonial realities of the region. Identity is central to the lives of people inhabiting these spaces. They are broadly categorised as the Indian Nepalis or Gorkhas. The tropes that define the region as ‘conflict zone’ or ‘tourist destination’ continue to treat the people and their spaces merely as ‘sites of knowledge production’. Mridu and Dipti aim to move past these tropes and locate the relevance of photography as a medium of knowledge production amidst the lives of the people as told by them. Through this they will attempt to explore the significance of arts practices as powerful forms of storytelling in societies with contested histories.

Mridu and Dipti will work with the Confluence Collective to bring together the archival, visual and oral narratives of the everyday lives of the people of the region. They will also identify a group of photographers from queer communities to make this project more diverse and inclusive in nature. This project will be in partial fulfilment of a much larger aim of Mridu and Dipti to create a platform for the photographic practice as a form of archiving stories and oral narratives of the rich histories of the place and communities of Darjeeling Himalayas. 

The outcome of this project will be a photobook and two exhibitions of photographs by young contemporary photographers from the region in Kalimpong and Darjeeling. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the photobook and audiovisual documentation generated during the fieldwork.