Artist, Sheba Chhachi: I’m Sheba Chhachhi. I live and work in New Delhi. You are looking at my series Seven Lives and a Dream, and it explores feminism and activism in India.
I started as a documentary photographer at the height of the anti-dowry movement. Dowry is a traditional practice where, when a marriage is arranged between two families, the woman’s family puts together objects of value which are gifted to the husband and the husband’s family as a dowry. This became an opportunity for husbands to extract more and more from the girls’ family. Women were being murdered for not having brought enough money in their marriages.
A small group of feminist activists began speaking up about this. And from initial hostile reactions, it grew to a sense of shame, because the whole community was complicit in this.
I recorded the movement across a period of about 10 years. But certain questions had begun to trouble me. One was the question of power. I knew these women in much greater complexity than my photographs of them actually presented. So I invited seven women from the women’s movement to collaborate with me to create a series of staged portraits. Each woman was invited to choose a place, props, a gaze, which she felt could represent her life.
I combined photographs from the documentary period, along with the staged portraits, to create a kind of mosaic of images. This idea of agency became the bedrock of my practice. And all the photographs I make with people are grounded on this: that they have a right to determine how they are represented.