Beyond the maze of relics of grandeur, the forts and palaces of Rajasthan that photographers often find themselves lost in, Sudhir Kasliwal’s Rajasthan is that of common folk and the concerns that move them – a village fair, a woman baking her daily bread, a cow girl lilting homeward.
His photos are a powerful visual narrative that pushes to the fore ordinary people of Rajasthan in their everyday lives, organically captured by an extraordinary eye.
Picked from his oeuvre built with glass negatives, large formats, 35 mm’s, transparencies, digital photographs and every conceivable photographic process, Sudhir’s photographs reveal an eye for piquant situations and impeccable sense of timing.
Through these masterstrokes he often paints the photographic canvas with mystery, drama and an unmistakable aesthetic construct. A camel groaning under the collective weight of a score of scrambling villagers, women drinking water out of leather shoes as part of an exorcism ritual, a mother parked into timelessness with her infant by a running tap are just some examples.
Sudhir first took to photography during his school days at St. Xavier’s in Jaipur. He often gives credit for it to the very talented Jesuit, Father Ryan, who setup a dark room to teach photography at the school.
Sudhir’s favourite hunting grounds continue to be fairs and festivals of Rajasthan, providing as they do, an occasion to reunite the different strands of the state’s rich cultural fabric. These forages have yielded many of Sudhir’s best studies of the numerous tribes of Rajasthan – the Bhils, the Gadiya Luhars, the Garasiyas.
For Sudhir, love for photography doesn’t end with what he photographs; rather his pictures become a rectangular receptacle brimming with essence of his aesthetic and social mores. And over the decades, he has lovingly shared this essence with numerous photography students.
Father Ryan with his photography students at St. Xavier’s, Jaipur, 1963. Sudhir is standing at extreme right.
Sudhir’s photographs have been internationally recognized and have appeared regularly in leading journals world over. His aerial photographs of Jaipur commissioned by Government of Rajasthan featured in a special brochure presented to the then U.S. President Bill Clinton who visited Jaipur in the year 2000. In 2009, Kasliwal won accolades for curating an exhibition of 255 rare and exquisite photographs of Rajmata Gayatri Devi at the Jaipur Jewellery Show. These photographs truly bore out Kasliwal’s assertion on the eve of the exhibition, ‘Once you enter the gallery tomorrow, you will forget the diamonds and the rubies’. In October 2014, Sudhir was awarded the Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II Award for Excellence in Photography by Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II Museum Trust, City Palace, Jaipur; for having internalized Rajasthan through his lens.
Yet, after sixty years of crafting magic with large formats, transparencies, wide varieties of film, digital photographs, his darkroom is still the place he is most drawn to. Meditatively developing a roll of film is just as rewarding an experience for Sudhir as exposing it.
In the world of contemporary Indian photography, Sudhir Kasliwal’s work on the people of Rajasthan, spanning sixty years continues to be arguably the most eloquent. Each of these frames, serenades the people on the other side of his camera.
