Anu Kumar

Nagar

Soon after I was born in Delhi in 1990, my family immigrated to Melbourne, Australia. The child of two Indian parents trying to leave India behind, I had decided the west was superior and our annual trips to India felt like a burden. It was only when I was 19 and returning to India alone as an adult that I began to see things differently. Something shifted inside me and I was ready to embrace what I had been rejecting my whole life. Four years ago I started taking pictures in the streets surrounding our family home in Kavi Nagar. With my aunt as my guide, I would appear shyly from behind her after she had gained permission from a passer by to take their picture. I knew if I was to open my mouth they would label me an outsider; a reality I was not ready to face feeling recently embraced by India. I knew I didn’t belong anywhere, and that scared me. Taking pictures had become my ticket into a world I left behind: a way for me to understand my Indianness, and explore the life I could have had if we never left 28 years ago.  These images were taken in my home town of Kavi Nagar in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.