Barefoot Collage

A text catalogues the achievements of the Barefoot College and spells out the Gandhian ideology that it uncompromisingly identifies with. From the inception of this "experiment" in community management, strong value judgements have determined the means of development that are acceptable and those that are not. Traditional skills and wisdom drawn from within village communities—"people's technologies"—are to be applied as solutions to their problems first, before relying on the wasteful and exploitative skills of "strangers" and knowledge from "outside". Rejecting conventional literacy, 150 night schools in the region enable shepherd boys and girls to learn: everyone in the village is considered an educational resource. Women are empowered by being encouraged to work in fields that were traditionally the monopoly of men. Solar energy lights schools, technology that is not exploitative and is thus acceptable. A visionary comment states that "this approach has devalued and rejected the urban professionals produced by the formal education system".

Artistically, the photographs are what might be expected of such an exercise: simple, well-exposed frames of the environs and activities of Tilonia, most of them faithful documents of the life of the college. A few evoke human and pictorial interest. Some elicit a smile. Sadly, the eye searches in vain for the promised individualistic perspective, a different way of seeing, a departure from the sikhlaya hua tarika of barefooted vision. Such homogeneity in a selection culled from an archive a hundred thousand images strong is disappointing. Some photographer must have looked away from the women carrying water, the community marches and the bio-gas plants. Someone must have looked back at the founders, the original strangers.

This positivism unfortunately colours the editorial interpretation of the photographs as well. Images are juxtaposed without much consideration for their varying provenance only to score yet again for the redoubtable college. Pushy captions snuff out the quieter pictures (women lying in rows awaiting vaccination are dubbed as "Talking and resting in harmony"; a girl collecting cowdung is captioned "Tilonia seeks to curb child labour..."). Scattered amidst a text that is convinced of its own correctness, the photographs serve as illustrations, the 'book' as an un-Gandhian lush exhibition catalogue.

Documentary photography has always been troubled by the concerns of representation, an old worry that becomes more political with the introduction of middlemen. The photographer's original vision unavoidably gets hung on a curatorial, conceptual peg.If, perchance, the photographer happens to be anonymous, the curator needs to curb his sudden freedom. If the work lies within the noble ambit of sustainable development, he needs to heighten his own objectivity.