The African Portraits

Mahesh Shantaram chronicles everyday racism in India through a series of poignant portraits of African students who live here. Raj Lalwani discusses the visual and social nuances that lie within.

- Raj Lalwani

It’s in the time of the hypersensitive that we are all desensitised. In the January of 2016, Bangalore saw a horrendous case of racism when a young Tanzanian woman was beaten up and stripped by a mob, after a Sudanese student—who was otherwise completely unrelated to the aforementioned Tanzanian— had run over and killed a local. It was a new low in a shameful series of crimes against Africans living in India. The vengeance of the vigilante mob, now commonplace in this age of constant outrage, painting their hate in one broad stroke. One dark-skinned African punished for the crime of another. It may be poignant to remind ourselves that Africa is actually a diverse continent of 54 countries.

It is perhaps the turbulence of the modern day that even the rarest of rare is so common that we barely flinch. It was but just another headline, just another statistic. News media and journalism have too short a memory, and it was photography instead that came to the fore, urging us to observe and reflect. The incident was a flashpoint for practitioner Mahesh Shantaram. He chose not to react. He instead chose to engage.

Shantaram has been casting a mirror on Indian society for a few years. With a curious eye and a fondness for quirk, he has been documenting the disparate, yet similar worlds of weddings and elections. Both, social events accompanied by a theatre of the absurd, both, being a microcosm of India, an amalgamation of all that is right and wrong about this country. His is a subjective documentary approach, which seeks to unearth the layers that lie within the charades, and in turn, create a snapshot of contemporary society that can serve as a historic reference, several years down the line.