NID Photography Design students have been tracing the history of Indian photography as part of their course work since 2010. Through their dissertations, they have been looking at family archives, studios, libraries, museums and private collections of photography throughout India. Indian photographic history is often relegated to photographs of Royalty and the photography of British and European photographers who looked at the country through a certain colonial gaze, apart from very few well know Indian photographers of the 20th century. The dissertation functions not only as a database of alternate photographic histories, but they also

contextualise this history around the wider world of politics, society as well as aesthetics of the time in a particular region. This is gradually building into an archive that would be extremely valuable to scholars studying the history of Indian photography through alternative sources such as vernacular photography, the family archive as well as commercial studios in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Working with my family archives, I made a book ‘Alaigal’ which spans through the life of my maternal granfather and the different ways my family migrated in search of a place to call home.