Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
Photograph © Ishan Tankha
A Peal of Spring Thunder is a project on life and the environment in Chhattisgarh, a mineral-rich state in eastern India, shaped by the politics of control over land as resource. Its title is from a phrase adopted by the Chinese People's Daily to describe the onset of peasant revolution in India in 1967. It documents an ongoing conflict, which began as a peasant revolution and evolved into a near perpetual state of guerilla war between the local indigenous tribes and the Maoist insurgents on one side, and government and corporations on the other.
Throughout the region are clumps of desperately poor adivasis, who are being told that the state cares about improving their lives, bringing them the benefits of development, all the while security forces are deployed to clear their forested homesteads that sit atop the richest deposits of coal, iron, and bauxite. Successive government policies regarding land acquisition for the purposes of mining and industry have diluted powers that the people had, leaving them no choice but to be forcefully evicted from their own lands.
In a situation where identities can be blurred, wrongful imprisonment, fabricated cases, custodial violence, including rape and death at the hands of the security forces, are alarmingly frequent and justice rare. The images follow adivasis and Maoist soldiers as they negotiate inhabited, forested, and barren landscape, profoundly affected by commercial and political prospectors and try to make sense of an embattled peoples' determination to survive after years of being forced to tread a thin, treacherous line between the state and armed revolutionaries.
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At the time of our 1:1 Interview with Ishan, he was asked these questions about A Peal of Spring Thunder.
PSA: What led you to start working with Maoist rebels? And when did you begin this project?
IT: I began working on the subject while I was working at India Today in 2008. It took many months of my colleague and me working to convince the editors that we look at the subject of the Salwa Judum (which had led to one of the bloodiest, most violent periods in Chhattisgarh).
PSA: Why did you choose to work on this project both in B/W and color?
IT: I didn't have a stylistic / aesthetic reason to do that in the beginning. I wanted a backup camera on an assignment that would take us into the jungle for many days and battery life was an issue. So, I picked up my film camera and I happened to have some BW film to spare at home, and so took that along. In fact, I misplaced the 30-odd rolls of film I shot on that assignment and developed them nearly 3-4 years later, when they reappeared at home during some renovation.
On reviewing the images, I felt that there was something that worked and continued to use both color (digital) and BW film.
PSA: The images that you have made of the Maoists serve to sort of demystify the standard way Maoist combatants are represented in the local, mainstream media. Please elaborate on this choice of image making.
IT: I have an image that I made somewhere in Bastar that has a photographer lying flat on the ground attempting, and eventually succeeding, to instruct a bunch of young and giggling, armed combatants to stand around him and point the barrel of their guns into his wide-angle lens. Sadly, this situation that I witnessed is not an aberration. It is just one example of how a certain kind of imagery is made and used to talk about a very complex and layered situation - one that is not about guns but primarily about people.
I also don't think it's just about the mainstream alone. In general, the editing process employed by most publishing platforms are, at best, lazy, with very little attention paid to whether images are staged and, at worst, clearly prejudiced.
What began as a week-long assignment for me, morphed into an association over a decade. Perhaps I'm being a bit cynical, but I never thought my work was going to 'demystify' or change perceptions. Journalists, sociologists, and writers have said much more than all the images put together, for those who have actually been interested enough to find out. At best my images help bring a few more people to the discussion. I do believe in the power and impact of photography, but it is difficult not to see the inherent issues with what I do, which is photograph the lives of others.
PSA: What compels you or keeps you motivated to continue working on this project?
IT: Simply put, this project began with a focus on the Naxals and, as I understood more about situation, it expanded into issues of displacement, land and human rights, mining, and so on. What began as a typical parachute journalist response, with time I think, has evolved into a longer, deeper relationship with the region and a few of its inhabitants.
PSA: Has working on this project impacted you?
IT: Working on this project has helped clarify my own ideas about many things - how does democracy in a place like India actually work; what does development mean; this has helped me understand and acknowledge my own privileges. The experience of working on this project has helped me understand how interconnected our worlds actually are despite the obvious differences and distance.
20 November
