“Bengal is a weird place,” says Gupta. “You have magnificent colonial buildings and you have palatial buildings built by the Indian feudal lords or zamindars when they were at the pinnacle of their success. I went once in search of a gunpowder magazine a bit further from the Calcutta Docks. All ships needed to unload their gunpowder before entering Calcutta. While I was there, I found an ancient post office which existed during colonial days, now in ruins.”
Gupta says these ruins are ‘haunted’ by the people he found, who he describes as ‘ghosts’, a term which may again risk charges of dehumanisation. On the other hand, they’re residents who have made their home in a place where millions were – and still are – impoverished, while others grew rich. From this perspective, seeing them as ‘ghosts’ might evoke another reference; Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2011 book, Ghosts of Empire: British Legacies in the Modern World, which argues that the negative effects of British colonial rule are still felt worldwide. For the people in Gupta’s Eden, perhaps, these effects are all too real, making their homes far from paradise. They are “struggling and dwelling in the ruined world,” says Gupta. “Survivors still breathing.”
It’s a dark vision of a badly ruled world now nearing apocalypse, but Gupta’s project also suggests a more positive reading. If both people and the land have been ransacked, it’s fitting that nature now rises up. The next stage, perhaps, is for the people to do the same. Maybe, like new trees and creepers, new worlds are taking root – or rather, new readings of the world we all inhabit. “In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life,” reads a quote at the start of the Eden book dummy; the quote is from Karl Marx’s Capital I, and illustrates the idea that, in disenfranchising the workers, capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction.
Meanwhile the sheer fact Gupta is making and showing work also points to new directions – because his work, like work by other non-Western image-makers, is finally penetrating the Eurocentric photography world. “Photography has become much more plural,” says Gupta, picking out Indian photographers and curators such as Sohrab Hura, Prashant Panjiar, Dinesh Khanna, Bharat Sikka and Sudharak Olwe as inspirations, as well as the “talent-making machines” of Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Angkor Photo Workshop and Nepal’s Photo.Circle. “We have never been so visible,” he says.