The family album

When Tara Colburn first journeyed to India in 1993, she was on a quest: To find her son Cyril who had switched faiths to swear by the ISC...

When Tara Colburn first journeyed to India in 1993, she was on a quest: To find her son Cyril who had switched faiths to swear by the ISCKON movement. What her eye registered, as she meandered through rural India to track down Cyril, was enough to make her pick up a camera and kick-off a romance with the India away from the lure of the big city. Four thousand slides, eight trips and five years later, Colburn’s vision of Tribal India’ is now being exhibited in the city.

Colburn has trained her lens on the people of Kondh, Bondo and Saura tribes in Orissa and on the villagers of Rajasthan. Croatian by birth, she left Zagreb when she was eight, to school in Germany and later settle in America.

A student of music and ballet, photography was then strictly a family affair. Though, she says, "Composition has always interested me, whether in dance or music or in fashion." But the camera was what she picked up to capture the inherent aesthetic of rural India’s mud huts and veiled women. "The ensemble of avillage, its architecture is visually very appealing," she points out. "If I could write, I would have written about tribal India. But instead, I choose to photograph it."

Colburn’s frames are kept tight, with just a mere hint of the ambience, and she ignores the temptation to garnish them with the typical colours that are rural India. Instead, like pages out of a family album, a mother peeks at the camera through her translucent yellow veil as she feeds her child, and a tribal child shows off her intricate headwear. In Colburn’s India, women hog the canvas, whether as mothers, workers or girl children. "Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that my son was lost to me," she says. Rural India can be encapsulated in children’s smiling faces’, she feels. The intricate web of family relationships, she feels, can be attributed to strong religious and social traditions. "In comparison with the West, nobody, not even a beggar, is homeless here. Everybody belongs somewhere, whereas we in the Westvacillate in our solitude," she remarks.

Clicking rural India has been very humbling, says Colburn, "It has taught me how one can survive on so little." But her canvas has been flecked by changes since she first arrived, she observes, pointing to the denudation of forests in Orissa due to large-scale deforestation and the changes in attire of second generation tribals.

Yet, Colburn says she can zoom in on little else. "Urban India doesn’t interest me at all," she laughs. Her affair with the tribal landscape looks set to rage on; on October 23, she will make another jaunt to Orissa and then to Rajasthan for the Pushkar fair, to continue doing what she loves doing in India the most. "I think that on a sub-conscious level, I am sill trying to find out why my son embraced a God foreign to us. My connection with India probably has to do with this…"

At Cymroza Art Gallery. Till Nov 7, 1998. Time: 10 am and 7 pm.