Qasba(s) of Awadh is a body of photographs made during field research for the 2020 edition of the Mahindra Sanatkada Lucknow Festival, whose theme that year was the Qasbas of the Awadh region.
The qasbas are small towns that predate most urban centres in the region. They grew as places of Sufi and Bhakti learning, where folk theatre, Ramlila, and poetry flourished alongside craft and culinary traditions that the city eventually inherited. The qasbati ethos of coexistence, of different faiths sharing the same festivals and the same streets, shaped a culture with its own character and its own continuities.
I moved through these towns looking for what remains of that world. The shrines still bringing people together, the weavers and potters still at work, the maniharins and na'uns still part of daily life, the particular sounds of a morning that have not changed much in a long time. The photography followed the festival's own framing: not an exercise in nostalgia, a record of what is still here.
