Documenting Diversity through Faces, PARI Brings Rural Realities to the Forefront
~ The People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) uses storytelling, photojournalism and art to document the diversity of India’s rural and marginalised communities.
~ PARI’s projects challenge stereotypes, preserve traditions, and engage youth in documenting rural India’s diversity, says Kanika Gupta.
Saligao :2025 — In a country as diverse as India, where geography often shapes identity, facial features can sometimes be a giveaway and sometimes, like in the case of residents of India’s northeastern region, a probable cause for discrimination.
At the Museum of Goa’s recent MOG Sundays talk, Kanika Gupta and Shreya Katyayani from the Mumbai-based People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) unpacked this quiet, everyday prejudice through the lens of their FACES Project, a visual record of India’s human diversity that tries to ask, and answer, what it means to look Indian, through photojournalism.
The FACES project at PARI was germinated in 2014 when a young boy from Arunachal Pradesh was brutally assaulted in the national capital. When onlookers asked why he was assaulted, they were told that he looked ‘different’.
“A person from the North-East looks very different from someone in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, or from Gujarat or Jammu and Kashmir. But they’re all just as Indian as those who are usually represented in mainstream media,” said Gupta, a senior content editor at PARI.
“We rarely see this diversity. And while we’re mapping facial diversity, we’re also trying to map occupational diversity, because the majority of our country works in the informal sector, and yet it remains the least documented,” she also said during the MOG Sundays talk.
As part of its mandate to document lesser-known facets of India, PARI’s team has travelled across the country, capturing stories that reveal not just how people look, but how they live – shaped by land, climate and centuries of tradition and the relationship that the flora and fauna share with their unique geography.
Gupta recounts other fascinating cases, like that of the unique swimming Kharai camels from the Kutch region. Adapted to the coastal mangrove ecosystems, these camels have unique dietary needs, sustained only by the vegetation found on the surrounding islands. To survive, they swim from one island to another, a remarkable example of coexistence between nature and traditional livelihoods.
Also featured in her presentation is the Ghore family from Belgaum, located on the Karnataka-Goa border. They remain among the last artisans crafting cotton ropes by hand, using methods passed down through generations. “They are the last family who make these. In a couple of years, I think they will also stop. Because it is very difficult for them to sustain themselves through this livelihood.” she said. Their struggle to continue this work reflects the broader challenge of preserving traditional knowledge systems in a rapidly changing economy.
During her talk, she also highlighted the Archive of Adivasi Children’s Art, a powerful collection of 111 paintings created by 98 tribal school children. These artworks were inspired by stories from their own communities, shared in classroom settings. The children responded by writing about themes such as livelihood, climate change, environment and gender, subjects that reflect their lived realities.
Speaking about the disconnect between rural and urban India, Gupta recalls how students often responded with “supermarket” when asked where their food came from. “They did not realise that the majority of our population works in agriculture,” she notes. PARI addresses this disconnect by bringing rural experiences into classrooms through stories and visual media.
Alongside Gupta, Shreya Katyayani, filmmaker and a senior video editor at PARI, showcased two films, one on the mosque and mausoleum in the Mari village, cared for by the local Hindus, and another about a madrasa in Nalanda — incidentally home to one of the world’s oldest universities — in Bihar, which imparted education to students from both genders.
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