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TAMASHA

Tamasha is a docu-fiction. This photographic project explores everyday challenges faced by Tamasha, a 100 person family collectively known as Lokkalawant that live their life like nomads across the state of Maharashtra in India. The project focuses on their everyday life and is documented to reflect the discriminative and prejudicial treatment towards them. People in the community often see them as a form of entertainment and neglect their basic needs.

Some instances are so repetitive through society that we often find ourselves getting used to them. A certain hierarchy and discrimination have always existed. Through Tamasha I would like to reflect on the issues that I so often observed in our society. I made a lot of trips to visit the Tamasha family to create these photographs. Peeking into the lives of others is not easy, spending time with them in their space and becoming one of them was very difficult for me when I started. I spent time with them over a period of 6 months in 2016. I traveled and stayed with the Tamasha tribe to understand and experience their daily life. What started off as an initial idea of just exploring a dying art that has been followed in Maharashtra since the 16th century, slowly built up to where I am now, where I allowed myself to explore another side of Tamasha as a performance to symbolize visual arts to convey artistic expression that revolves around discrimination.

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