From cobra-headed deities behind tills to the farmers who invaded Delhi, set up camp and stayed for a year, these uncompromising images reveal a side to the country that is rarely seen<\/p>\n
Gauri Gill started out in her 20s, a Delhi-based photojournalist covering stories right across India. She\u2019d drop in, drop back out, then later find herself wondering what had happened to all the people she had photographed. \u201cIn India, as across the world,\u201d says Gill, \u201cthe rural is being written out. The city \u2013 and AI is an extreme extension of the city \u2013 leads us to think we can do everything through machines. But the actual people on the ground \u2013 the farmers, the peasants, the Adivasis [the term given to India\u2019s indigenous peoples], the forest-dwellers, who have lived so beautifully and so sustainably on the earth and from whom we should be learning \u2013 are being crushed.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1999, Gill saw a young girl being beaten by her teacher at a school near Jodhpur and decided this was something she needed to spend longer on. She pitched a story on village schools. When no commission came, Gill quit her job at a magazine and made her way back to the farthest reaches of Rajasthan, to the Thar desert. She wanted to record what life there was like, especially for women and girls. She could not look away.<\/p>\n