Viewing Vistas Instagram Photo Contest – Museum Snaps

These photos my father had taken in 1962 when he left India by boat during the British rule, to study in London. In this first photo, he is a “tourist” in Switzerland, in the second he is posing in Trafalgar Square in London. My work has been greatly influenced by his journey: his hopes, dreams and issues of emigrating from India to the United States and at the same time on a more abstract level, why my father, growing up in British India, takes on the views and values of the colonizer.

As a diasporic artist I find I embody the paradoxes of being an American and being part of the South Asian Diaspora; being Western and Eastern, critically analyzing colonialism and at the same time desiring a discredited history. I find we reinterpret our parent’s lives; their identity becomes part of ours as we explore the politics of representation.

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