There are certain stories that stay with us long after the headlines disappear.
Recently, when I heard about a girl child rescued by a co-passenger, it immediately reminded me of a conceptual body of work I began developing during the infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case and the many other incidents of violence and abuse against girl children and women that shook the country.
At that time, I struggled with a question:
How does one visually document pain, fear, violation, and silence without directly showing victims?
The answer came unexpectedly.
I began noticing abandoned toys and discarded dolls around me — lying in garbage bins, dump yards, street corners, pavements, and forgotten spaces. These dolls slowly transformed into metaphors in my mind: used, damaged, abandoned, and thrown away after serving someone’s purpose. Their silent presence began reflecting the disturbing way society often objectifies and treats women and girl children.
What started as an observation gradually became an intense visual journey. Over time, I photographed these discarded dolls from different places, building a conceptual archive of silent witnesses to violence, neglect, and social indifference.
This body of work later became part of my solo exhibition Walking the Line, Living Together / Apart, showcased in New Delhi in 2021 under the section titled Unseen • Unheard • Untold Stories.
The project was rooted in a painful reality:
In India, women continue to be humiliated every day — harassed, violated, abused, and murdered. We may proudly speak of technological progress and 5G advancement, yet as a society we still struggle with dignity, empathy, and the ability to accept women as equal human beings.
The brutality becomes even more unbearable when caste, class, and social inequities shape the way women are perceived and treated. There exists a deep and disturbing sense of entitlement over women’s bodies and lives across all sections of society.
Perhaps the beginning of change lies in how we see women — not as objects of worship, desire, control, or possession, but as human beings of flesh and blood, deserving equal dignity, freedom, safety, and life.
For me, this work was never merely about photographing discarded dolls. Every image carried an emotional burden. Each abandoned toy I encountered felt like a silent testimony — holding within it traces of fear, abandonment, violence, memory, and survival. Many times, while photographing them in lonely streets, garbage heaps, or forgotten corners, I felt disturbed by how naturally these metaphors appeared around us, as though society itself had unconsciously scattered these symbols in plain sight.
The project slowly became less about documentation and more about confronting my own helplessness, anger, and grief as a human being witnessing repeated violence against women and children. Through these images, I was searching for a visual language to speak about what often remains unseen, unheard, and deliberately ignored.
Even today, whenever another such incident comes to light, these photographs return to me — not simply as artworks, but as reminders of a wound society continues to carry, and too often chooses not to heal.
More images from the project
untold stories
Noble commendable work