Sidi lights One of India’s smallest communities gets big play in this new photography book hen eminent photographer Ketaki Sheth went looking for lions in the Gir National Park in Gujarat in 2005, she also found a sanctuary for Sidis, or Indians of African origin. Sheth’s journey to Gir took her through Sirwan, a Sidi village. Intrigued by the community, which has been in India for over a millennium, Sheth returned the next year to Sirwan and other parts of Gujarat, where the bulk of the Sidis live, to capture their daily rhythms and community rituals. After five years of documenting the social and religious practices of the community, Sheth has compiled her effort into a book of 75 full-page images and close to 15 smaller ones, A Certain Grace: The Sidi, Indians of African Descent. Photoink will hold an exhibition of the photographs in Delhi in September and in Mumbai next March. Insightful essays by social historian Mahmood Mamdani and art historian Rory Bester, who have written extensively on the African diaspora and African art, respectively, bookend A Certain Grace. Mamdani traces the history of the Sidis in India and probes the community’s links with Africa. “Unlike with people of African descent in the Americas, the Sidi communities of India are not bonded historically by the experience of slavery,” writes Mamdani. “To begin with, not all came as slaves; a significant number came as free persons. Furthermore, unlike the slave experience in the capitalist plantations of the Americas, most slaves of the pre-modern world were joined to dynasties and households…”
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 20:17:26 +0000
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