Nothing Left to Call Home

“Nothing Left to Call Home” is a visual and narrative research project that foregrounds women’s lived experiences of communal violence in South Asia since the Partition of India in 1947. By centring women’s voices-often fragmented, silenced, or mediated through collective memory — the project exposes how sectarian conflict is inseparable from patriarchal structures of power.

Violence here in my land is not merely episodic or exceptional; it is systemic, gendered, and historically sedimented. Focusing on the intertwined histories of West Bengal in India and present-day Bangladesh, the project investigates how religious intolerance, electoral manipulation, and institutionalised terror converge to shape everyday life, while simultaneously reflecting on Bengal’s long and complex history of Hindu-Muslim coexistence. The 1947 Partition of India, driven by religious nationalism, reshaped citizenship around communal identity and replaced colonial rule with new forms of internal exclusion. Women were especially targeted, facing abduction, sexual violence, forced conversion, and honour killings, as their bodies became sites where ideas of purity, honour, and revenge were violently enforced. Nothing Left to Call Home foregrounds these silenced experiences, arguing that women’s narratives are central—not marginal-to understanding how communal violence has been produced, remembered, and transmitted across generations.

This Project is supported by

•⁠ ⁠Magnum Foundation- Inge Morath Estate (Finalist grant, 2021)
•⁠ ⁠Experimenter (Generator Grant,2021)
•⁠ ⁠Social Documentary Grant by SACAC & MurthyNayak Foundation (Finalist grant,2021)
•⁠ ⁠W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (Student grant, 2022)

** Work in progress (2020- )

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