03/10/2023
(T)o make her Balika Mela portraits, Gauri Gill participated in a local Mela for girls in the rural Rajasthani community she had spent a decade documenting, creating a simple photo studio and encouraging the girls (few of whom had opportunities to photographed) to set up their own shots, bring props, and invent their own poses. She also later offered photography classes to the girls and one even went on to become a photographer with a studio of her own. (Maya Kóvskaya, PhD)
Gauri Gill's Balika Mela images are all posed portraits. In Rama, a young woman in a white salwar-kameez sits on a folding metal chair, one hand extended tentatively towards a decorative flower pot stand. She looks straight at us, but we cannot see her eyes: she is wearing sunglasses. In Goga and Mahendra, two younger girls hold hands in what seems like a simple gesture of friendship, but also display their mehndi-ed palms. Sunita, Nirmala and Sita stand in a row, each holding up a hand arranged in a mudra of what might be blessing. Lichhma and Lali wear near-identical black leather jackets over their kameezes; one of them holds a black suitcase, as if in readiness for departure.
The images were created in 2003 and 2010, during fairs organised by the Urmul Setu Sansthan. The 2003 Balika Mela was attended by about 1,500 adolescent girls from a hundred odd villages spread across Lunkaransar, Chhattargarh, Churu, Nagaur and Ganganagar districts of Rajasthan. The girls, Gill writes, were between 12 and 20, "ranging from class five to class ten pass — mostly unmarried, and from a broad swathe of communities, castes and denominations — Jat, Meghwal, Gosai, Mali, Bavri, Rajput, Swami, Kumar, Brahmin, Nai, Nayak, Sansi, Bhatt, Suthar, Muslim". Asked to "do something with photography" at the mela, Gill set up a photo stall in a tent, where anyone could come in and have their portrait taken. The photographs, she says, were "co-directed by me and those in the picture, as well as everyone around us".
In their willingness and enthusiasm to pose — with new friends and old, unexpected gestures, against a painted floral backdrop or seated on a motorcycle — they seem to want to enter the space of fantasy that photography enables.
And yet, they never laugh or even smile — their faces have been steadied into seriousness. In the stiffness with which they hold themselves, in their deliberate banishment of the 'candid', they seem closer to the "expressionless" Bhatisuda villagers than the pleasurable theatrical possibilities of the studio.
Gill's decision to label the photos with the girls' names seems, in this context, an attempt to call into being their individual selves, however tentative. It is also a conscious response, one imagines, to a long history of photography in which the camera captured either the richest or the poor. The rich had names; the poor could be, at most, representatives of social types: a bhishti, a sannyasi, a Toda, a dancing girl.
It must also be a conscious choice to not mark these girls as Jat or Meghwal or Sansi or Muslim. And yet getting away from these identities is not so easy. When Gill dedicates her book to "Urma and Halima, two girls who belong to the nomadic Jogi community" which "may almost be said to exist outside society as we know it", she is pulling those identities into the service of another kind of representativeness. And when she describes Urma and Halima as "looking at the camera with poise and confidence," the image that comes to her is "not unlike the Maharanis of a hundred years ago". (Trisha Gupta, The Sunday Guardian 23rd Sept. 2012)
http://www.gaurigill.com/
