Mumbra sits at the edge of Mumbai, a town built out of displacement. After the 1992-93 riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, thousands of Muslim families left the city centre and settled here. What was once a small population grew into a dense, self-contained world, over eighty per cent Muslim today, shaped by a segregation nobody had to legislate. I grew up in Mumbra as a non-believer inside that enclave, and left for France in 2022.
This project is a return, though not a homecoming. I photograph the town's women, its chaos, its faith and the spaces where faith goes quiet, its poverty and its stubborn resilience. I am interested less in explaining what happened in 1992 than in showing what accumulates in its aftermath: how a place organises itself around an old wound it does not discuss.
Some images in this series are missing parts of themselves, pixels or fragments deliberately removed. These translate what I could not look at directly while I still lived there: certain gazes, certain rooms, certain people. The erasures are not a stylistic device. They are closer to an honest record of my own limits as a witness, made visible instead of hidden.
Lost in Parts is an ongoing documentary project, part of a longer inquiry into belonging, gaze, and inherited violence in urban India.
