Its A Womans World

The story of In Black and White began a couple of years ago, when seven women in the media Bishakha Datta, Sashwati Banerji, Sohaila Abdul Ali, Sonali Ojha, Neela Kapadia, Munmun Ghosh and Chitrita Majumdar decided to form a group called Point of View. They didnt have snappy answers to burning issues, but they did have a question: Without the point of view of women, whats the point?

They joined hands with Aalochana in Pune, reasoning that if you wanted to find out more about a womans point of view, then a centre for research and documentation on women was a good place to start. Together, they came up with an ambitious project. As the 50th year of Indian independence drew to a close, they posed another key question: what has Independence really meant for women?

They kicked off work in January 1997. Fifteen months down the line, a national photographic exhibition hit the road. It featured over 125 images by photographers such as Sebastian Salgado, Dayanita Singh, Raghu Rai, Sheba Chhachi, Dilip Banerji, Gauri Gill and Satish Sharma, to name only a few. A grant from the Ford Foundation helped; it helped even more that Geeta Mishra, the Foundation representative, grew to believe in the project almost as much as its organisers.

They could have stopped here, and done the usual thing: taken the show round to Mumbai-Delhi-Calcutta, with perhaps a brief nod at Bangalore-Chennai, raked in the reviews and stayed happy. Instead, In Black and White has become a truly national exhibition thanks to its itinerary: Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Kochi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Panjim, Patna and Pune. Towns where the gravy train of Indian art usually never stops.

Its in these towns, the ones that make up the spinal column of Indian thought, that the story of responses to the exhibition starts. And intersects with the blas