Documenting Life on the Margins

Broken, Asha Thadani's exhibition of photographs of Dalit lives, makes us face some uncomfortable realities, but without robbing her subjects of their dignity

- Amit Dixit

According to self-taught photographer Asha Thadani, her work “has always centred around patterns and boundaries and power structures that define or differentiate the world and the complex ways in which these lines become etched, blurred, brittle and porous”. Thadani finds Dalit lives to be on this vulnerable frontier and feels “their inner world is not represented enough”. Broken: Dalit Lives, her ongoing exhibition at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi (on till January 7, 2024), addresses this imbalance by showcasing 10 Dalit communities from across India. This is a substantial body of work, still in progress, and the set being exhibited took Thadani seven years to document.

The communities are startlingly diverse. They include the Mallahs, boatmen among whom a sub-group, the