Patels In A Pod

THIS book arrives after weeks of discontent. At least threeexhibitions of photographs held in Mumbai and other parts of India recently had somethingmissing. The exhibitions were Some Children of the Dream (Australia), Ageing India(photographs by Samar S. Jodha, text by Vijay S. Jodha) and the T.S. Satyan retrospective.What they lacked was a book.

Along comes Ketaki Sheth's Twinspotting, exhibition in tow. My discontent shouldbe over but instead it intensifies. The publisher of the book's a Welshman, itsprinter Italian. Indian photographers have nowhere to turn to in India if they want to geta book out.

Publishing a good book of photographs is an expensive business. We know. When I askedSamar Jodha if he was thinking of bringing Ageing in India out as a book, he was appalled."We have to keep trying to raise funds just to keep the show going," he said.The book was an exorbitant dream.

It needn't be if some of our big business houses, who have smartly woken up to thevalue of our contemporary painters and sculptors, see the value of our photographers too.Couldn't one of them sponsor a yearbook of the best press and commercial photographs?Or an annual of the best press photographs. Or Ageing in India, a subject of crucialimportance as anyone can see?

I write this on the last day of this year's World Press Photo exhibition inMumbai. Also, Sheth's book arrived when I was writing an article on the shamefulneglect of photographers in this country. Sheth's text talks of the recurrence ofcoincidence in the lives of twins. No twins I know shares this coincidence in my life, ifit is coincidence. The confluence of exhibition, book and outburst is more likely theresult of a growing, sickening realisation that for the moment at least the professionallives of the best Indian photographers lie elsewhere.

Sheth's own life has taken her elsewhere through marriage and otherwise. Herattempts to get her work noticed here, through postcards for example, were only brieflysuccessful and the last of her photographs which I saw before Twinspotting were printed inEngland, in a book called An Economy of Signs and in London Magazine. On her frequentvisits here, meeting fellow photographers, she must be fully aware by now that the bestIndian photographers rule India with their prints abroad.

Having got that pun out of the way-I had to, I had to-here's the book. It's aperfect extension of the Mamiyaflex format-the photographs square, the books not sosquare-with 82 photographs of Patel twins in Britain and India. The British and Indiantwins generally appear on facing pages. There's no squaring off, no aggressionbetween them since each set of twins faces the camera or, when not, is involved in anactivity of its own quite independent of the British or Indian sides of the book.

Yet there's a link, as Sheth intends there to be. Her camera makes the physicaldistance between the twins on facing pages run on parallel tracks. Or rather it's thebook's design, by husband Aurobind, that makes that happen.

So Neelam and Nimita in Gujarat and Bijli and Bindya in Kent are linked by the similarlook of trees behind them. Niky and Nikunj, sandwiched between a rubber-tyred cartwheeland a car in Gujarat, have their richer and more relaxed female counterparts posing in acar in Middlesex. Adult twins Muni and Kuki let a cat pass between them in a garden inLondon like stylish matadors would let pass a bull, while child twins Amrit and Amish,bored at home in Anand, allow Macho, their dog, to come between them and bite one of theirfeet.Fine designs, fine resonances.

Does more come through? The mystique of twins, for example the bonding, so unnerving tothe twinless? It does. Two photographs especially made this viewer's skin crawl.Bijli and Bindya in another photograph, the sunlike flower on their T-shirts and thefloral pattern on their jeans eerily linking them to undisclosed forces of nature, anotherworld; and Milan and Mayur reclining on the front porch of their home, their elbows andpart of their forearms touching to give the effect of an angled mirror, so perfectly dothe pair reflect each other.

There's hard work in this book. Spotting twins in a London directory, thenspotting them in person, the journey to remote areas of Gujarat, breaking the icephotographers sometimes face in every climate, even the hottest, the freeze, the thaw, thedistance-endangering warmth. Sheth's detailed account of her twinspotting quest andher descriptions of her subject's habitats suggest an anthropologist's zeal.There's plenty of worked-out detail in the texts too.

My one flinch-point was with something Raghubir Singh wrote in his foreword. Hebelieves that with these photographs Sheth has taken a leap from her previous 35 mm streetphotographs and that she has found her voice. But it isn't final, this voice, thisquest to have a voice and be heard. A hundred years from now these photographs may bevalued more for their anthropological content than for the reasons we value them now. Theymay grow, in time, to be the equivalent of Deen Dayal's photographs of Indian princesor Mathew Brady's portraits from the American Civil War. They may grow, in time, tobe poignant fixtures of our past, just as Singh's own photographs are growing to bewith his untimely death in April this year. His foreword, dated April this year, must beone of the last pieces he wrote.