In images, in picturesBorn in London, the photographer has long disregarded his Indian origins. But the approach of his 50th birthday and Brexit made him wonder what his life would have been like if he had been born in India.
It is the story of a little boy who did not want to speak the language of his parents. “I was sent to a Gujarati school in London, but I only lasted a month”, he remembers. The same little boy dragged his feet every time his parents took him to see their family in Bombay. “I was really not comfortable. As a teenager, I even had a superiority complex when I went, and I actively rejected the idea that I was Indian. ”
Kalpesh Lathigra was born in London in 1971, has always lived there and considers himself a Westerner. Certainly, his parents were Indians who had passed through Africa from the British Empire (his father via Kenya, his mother via Zanzibar) before joining England with decolonization, but he was a native Londoner.
“When you were born in the West but are an immigrant, you are always looking for balance. »Kalpesh Lathigra
With the friends who came from the Caribbean, the exotic, it was the great American open sea and the movement for civil rights, not the Bollywood films swallowed in family on Sunday afternoon on the VCR rented for the day. “When you were born in the West but you are an immigrant, you are constantly looking for balance”, Kalpesh Lathigra explains.
In his mind, his first big adventure abroad, although he had been to India on numerous occasions, was his ferry trip to Boulogne-sur-Mer with his friends from the East End of London. Became press photographer for the British daily The Independent, “Kal”, as his friends call him, then crisscrossed the planet. And although in 2003 he embarked on a project to document the life of widows in India, he always asked, where possible, not to be systematically sent there. No question of becoming the labeled Indian photographer, unable to escape his genes.
Then time did its job. The photographer is now almost 50 years old, with a gray beard and children. Difficult times in the UK returned to him. As a child, Kalpesh Lathigra felt at home in London, but not in the rest of England, especially in the seaside villages. “I lived there racism, unpleasant remarks and insistent glances”, he recounts. Brexit, he says, rekindled those bad memories.
Police arrested him briefly
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