Kolkata and its moods make for easy portraits, but Saibal Das’ latest photography project plays around with cliches

At times, it seems like Kolkata is held afloat by collective nostalgia. A phantom so buried under the sands of time that it has to be evoked, not felt. Its labyrinthine lanes, its weathered buildings and its personal mythology only add to the aura.

But of course that’s just oversimplification —a sentimental surmise of a city negotiating 21st century. For Kolkata (or for that matter any great city) exists only in books for most. More so for those who call it their home. We make our way through its streets; call its rambling, colonial buildings our home/office/college/school but never really decipher it. We fall back on literature for that. Therefore, the city morphs itself as convenient clichés for us— ‘New York with palm trees’, as VS Naipaul famously belittled it or the postcolonial wonder of Sarnath Banerjee’s Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers.

One rainy morning, walking through the “maze of Kolkata by lanes”, photo-journalist Saibal Das decided to think beyond clichés. “As I was walking around I came upon a baby struggling to wriggle out of a shack but tumbling over and over again. However, his futile struggle and the glint in his eye as he tried to see the rain washed world outside somehow entranced me and I immediately thought of capturing the pulse of a place that nestles so much of diversity under its sky,” says Das.

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