Mascots of the Dead

Simulated animals and ecological amnesia

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I GREW UP in a remote village near the Sundarbans, a delta in southern West Bengal. To attend school, I had to travel to a town nearby that, in the 1990s, belonged to a quieter world. My school sat amid thick greenery, dotted with homes and lanes. At dusk, the sky darkened with the wings of birds returning to roost. When I visited five years ago, the school remained, but the town had become a dense mass. The trees were gone. In their place, dusty railings guarded statues of animals—grime-covered, lifeless, absurd.

The sight took me back to the suicide note of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student at the University of Hyderabad. Rohith took his own life, in 2016, after facing relentless caste-based violence at the university. “Our feelings are secondhand. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs are coloured. Our originality is valid through artificial art.” These words from his letter made me see how architecture—both social and environmental—is built to segregate and to normalise injustice.

Like Rohith, I come from a historically marginalised caste community and have known discrimination. As a society, our treatment of nature has always seemed to me like our treatment of the marginalised. Plants and animals are “othered” too. That explains the world we have built.

The destruction of a living tree—once a refuge for birds—and its replacement with cartoonish bird sculptures struck me with a kind of existential dread. The scene was both deeply symbolic and politically charged. It was not just about what was lost, but what was being installed in its place: a lifeless caricature of life. It evoked the simulacrum, a term used by the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard to describe how representations overtake reality and eventually erase it. As a photographer, I felt compelled to document this shift.