A woman laughing uninhibitedly, her head thrown back, her hair fanning about her. Two women lolling by the river enjoying an unguarded moment. A girl clutching a laptop in a straw cottage. Kalbelia dancers from Rajasthan applying makeup on their faces. What Deepti Asthana wants to document through these photographs are not snapshots of rural India, but rather stories of its people. She wants to tell the stories of the girls in Uttarakhand who spend hours fetching water every day, which impact their education and their health. She wants to tell the stories of the elderly women who are fighting to save the rivers and mountains of their villages, even though they are now getting too old to take care of themselves or ever enjoy the fruits of their labour. She wants to tell the story of the two women forest guards struggling in a male-dominated field, one a widow and the other having suffered miscarriages.
Asthana―who was recognised as ‘Global Talent Asia 2020’ by the World Press Photo and received a National Geographic grant in 2022 to document the water crisis in Uttarakhand―says much of her fascination with the lives of women in rural India comes from her own childhood. She grew up in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. Having lost her father at the age of four, her mother took care of her and her two siblings. The constant threat of being driven out of their house, which belonged to her father’s family, led to a deep sense of insecurity in her. And seeing her mother struggle made her passionate to tell the stories of women like her. She herself was abused by a relative and, as she says, it made her shy and submissive. It took the exposure of living in big cities to restore her self-confidence. “I had to put so much into changing the person that I had become,” she says. “There is so much of conditioning that when you are coming out of that environment, it takes a lot of energy to fight with yourself and live the life you really want to live.”
That is why the lens she trains on her subjects is such an empathetic one. It takes a special kind of person to go deep into the lives of rural women and capture the spectrum of their troubles and their triumphs. Because she has gone through it, she feels she can do justice to these stories. “Sometimes when I tell people about life in rural India, they are surprised,” she says. “They ask me whether this is still happening. I tell them that this is not what happened 10 or 20 years ago. Women in rural India are still fighting for basic things―for safety, for the right to education, for the right to choose their life partners.”
In many ways, for Asthana, her photography is a response to her own emotional state. She looks at it as self-therapy. Over the last few years, she sees her work growing intensely spiritual. During the pandemic, for example, she stayed for three years in Shillong. Living near the forest, she found the isolation to be healing. There, she did a portrait project, for the first time focusing on her own life. It looked at the journey of a woman who wanted to escape social mores, and so seeks refuge in the forest. Living close to nature, she learns life lessons that no books could teach her.
Two forest guards in Rajasthan.
Candid camera: Deepti Asthana
Teenage girls fetching water in Uttarakhand.
A pilgrim from Asthana’s project ‘Flowing like a river’.
Another project close to her heart is documenting the Narmada Parikrama, a pilgrimage of three years, three months and 33 days by the Narmada river. “The pilgrims take nothing with them except some extra clothing,” she says. “There is so much of trust and surrender that they will find food and shelter. That was a wonderful project because I met so many people who might not have seemed very sophisticated, but yet had so much of wisdom.”
And everyone she has met in her own pilgrimage through life has taught her something. “I come from a very normal educational background, so my main education has been through meeting people who face so many difficulties and yet find so much joy and peace in life,” she says. She gives the example of a fisherman she met in Tamil Nadu’s Dhanushkodi while working on a project for the Serendipity Arts Festival. An accident while blast fishing had deprived him of an arm and his eyes. His face was completely deformed. And yet, she says, he was one of the happiest people she had ever met. He would still go to work, sing the loudest while pulling in the heavy nets and laugh the heartiest at the smallest of things. “He jumped into the sea just so he could show me how he could swim with one arm,” she says. “Seeing these people really changes your perspective on life. It is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.”
For Asthana, there is no compartmentalisation between her life and her work. She is constantly in touch with the women and girls she has shot. Over the years, witnessing the shifts in their lives has often been rewarding, she says. She refers to the photographs she took of a few girls in Uttarakhand when they were 10 or 12 years old. When she returned many years later, they had become young women and the changes in their behaviour were stark. “They laughed a lot when they saw their childhood photographs that I had shot,” she says. “It was probably the only photographs of themselves that they had ever seen.”