India: a kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt of paradox
A decade Adrian Fisk spent ringside during an era of exponential change in South Asia spawned a phenomenal photographic archive.
In 2003, Adrian Fisk left the UK for India to follow a story about why snake-charming’s days were numbered. He was gone for eight years. As anyone who’s been will know, India can sweep you up like that.
‘Everything about India got under my skin: its history, poetry, light, colours, contradictions and complexities,’ says Fisk.
It was also, at that exact moment, a society that was changing at breakneck speed: after decades of stagnation India was experiencing a spasm of wild economic growth, and, with it, a huge surge in confidence.
In Delhi, where Fisk set up base, a new mall, nightclub or restaurant seemed to be opening every week. The new affluence in the big cities threw the distinctions between the educated and the have-nots, the migrant workers, the slum-dwellers and the rural poor into ever starker relief. As a visual storyteller, it was fertile, intoxicating, addictive, terrain.
In those eight years Fisk travelled the length and breadth of the country and the South Asian region, seeking in his compositions to shed light on exactly the profusion of unsettling juxtapositions — hope, adversity, grit, pluck, zeal, fanaticism.
That profusion is within each of Fisk’s photographs. You can see it in the eyes of the hundreds of penniless Bihari young men as they crammed into study for entry to one of India’s elite universities: their equivalent of a moonshot.
You can see it in the level of discipline insisted upon by the army general fighting the Naxals in India’s little-chronicled jungle war — so absolute even the street dogs have been drilled into carefully choreographed manoeuvres.
You can glimpse it in the almost-inscrutable, forever-swollen faces of the victims of dowry acid-attacks as they coiffe and sculpt the looks of the Pakistani elite.
The defiance of the entrepreneurs in the tanneries of the Dharavi slum, their unflinching gaze almost daring you to objectify them.
In the living, breathing, kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt of Sufi-infused Islam, as thousands bowed down as one for Friday prayers at the mosque in Srinagar at the height of the 2008 uprising there.
In a young woman’s life extinguished in the tsunami, her lustrous hair and iridescent sari blouse the only remnants of her vivacity.
On assignment for titles ranging from COLORS Magazine and the Independent’s Saturday Magazine, Fisk covered stories on the human-hair trade, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the riddle of a village with bizarre numbers of identical twins, pilgrims’ drug use at the Kumbh Mela. And got to the bottom of the snake charmer story, of course.
