Kaleidoscopic Play and Quiet Wisdom

If photography is, literally, the act of ‘writing with light’, photographer Sheetal Mallar shows us how it can also be the act of writing with shadow and darkness, penumbra and eclipse. Mallar’s protagonists — her human subjects as much as the environments she so memorably records — occupy a precarious threshold between the powers of vitality and the forces of extinction. Beneath these outward and visible subjects — ephemeral spaces and evanescent trades, aftermaths and afterlives — Mallar’s constant theme is transience. Encountering her protagonists, we recognise them, as well as ourselves, to be transients: creatures of passage afforded a brief leasehold by the cycle of time.

- Ranjit Hoskote

Sheetal Mallar finds her subjects in varied locales, each suggestive of the seesaw between buoyant dream and gritty actuality, a glittering past and a bleak future. Mallar crafts her pictorial narrative through a poetics of allusion, working with asides, stories told sotto voce, intriguing traces. In the process, she explores the sets of a noir thriller that recreates World War II Calcutta, its compositions of violence and its behind-the-scenes levity. She traverses the ruins of a fire-ravaged film studio, with decades’ worth of memorabilia charred, blowing in the wind. Discreetly, she enters video parlours that cater to a shifting, or drifting, population of workers fresh from villages and small towns, holding on to fantasy even as the protocols of labour grind them down. Mallar’s camera glides through the home of a family that specialised in producing horror movies, their everyday domestic reality as much a homage to the spectral and the grotesque as their scenography had been. It pauses among the rows of jaunty, flamboyant, sometimes legendary, sometimes dated outfits hanging in a store that is famous for supplying costumes to the theatre and the movies. The photographer traces, without intruding upon them, the lives of movie extras: the popular Hindi cinema’s ‘junior artistes’, condemned to haunt a marginal zone between expectation and achievement. Beneath these outward and visible subjects — ephemeral spaces and evanescent trades, aftermaths and afterlives — Mallar’s constant theme is transience. Encountering her protagonists, we recognise them, as well as ourselves, to be transients: creatures of passage afforded a brief leasehold by the cycle of time.