Uncovering India’s Siddi Community.

March 24, 2013, 9:00 AM By Shanoor Seervai

Ketaki Sheth

Celebrating Urs, Jambur, 2006.

Ketaki Sheth first encountered the Siddi in 2005 on a family holiday to the Gir forest in Gujarat. This community of African origin would become her photographic obsession.

Over the next seven years she traveled to remote towns and villages, mostly in Gujarat and Karnataka, taking pictures of the Siddi, an ethnic group from east Africa that came to India more than 400 years ago.
Ms. Sheth’s work culminates in a book of black and white photographs, “A Certain Grace: The Sidi, Indians of African Descent,” which went on sale Friday.
On her first visit to Jambur, a Siddi village in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat, she saw three boys playing carom outside a store selling beedis, or hand-rolled cigarettes. She says they gave her a look of condescension that confirmed her fears of being perceived as another typical tourist, even though she didn’t have her camera.
She continued to visit Jambur and Sirwan, the village where she’d first encountered the Siddi, and gradually developed relationships with the people who lived there.
Using a 30-year-old medium format film camera, a Mamiya 6, Ms. Sheth pays close attention to the personality traits and circumstances of the people she photographs. The delicate details of the landscape, the cracked paint of whitewashed walls and shadows of overhanging trees, don’t detract from their stories.

Ketaki Sheth

Hirbaiben Lobi on her three-acre farm, Jambur, 2005.

Ms. Sheth became close friends with Hirbaiben Lobi, whose success as an entrepreneur is evident in a photograph on her three-acre farm in Jambur. Beneath the shade of palm trees, with her right hand on her hip, she stares defiantly into the camera. Her jewelry glints under the sun, adding to this portrait of fierce independence.
“When I told her we have to chase the light, she must have thought I was nuts, but she did it anyway,” says Mumbai-based Ms. Sheth.
After photographing the Siddi over the years, from Gujarat to the Manchikeri forests of Karnataka, Ms. Sheth knew she wanted to publish a book.
Along with portraits and scenes of daily life, Ms. Sheth’s pictures depict how the Siddi community has embraced Indian Sufism while retaining some of the song and dance traditions of its African heritage. Her work tackles complex questions of diaspora and belonging, not least in how the Siddi differ from Africans of Indian origin.
“Celebrating Urs, Jambur, 2006,” captures a group of children at an annual festival to commemorate an ancestral Sufi saint. Two of the children smile shyly into the camera, but the rest seem blissfully unaware that they are being photographed, and continue to dance and clap.

Ketaki Sheth

Ramzamma laughs when asked if she is pregnant with her first child. It is actually her fourth, Jambur 2005.

In another image, a woman called Ramzamma throws her head back and laughs with contagious abandon. The caption explains that she was asked if she was pregnant with her first child, when it was actually her fourth.
Ramzamma emerges from the page, confident and good-natured in spite of the challenges that she will likely face raising a fourth child in a relatively poor Indian village. Ms. Sheth captures this story of motherhood with a compassion that resonates across cultures.
These are portraits that speak to a common humanity.
“A Certain Grace: The Sidi, Indians of African Descent,” photographs by Ketaki Sheth with essays by Mahmood Mamdani and Rory Bester, costs 1,500 rupees ($28).