A Displaced Hope

A Displaced Hope is a visual journey into the world of Djinn worship at the Firoz Shah Kotla fortress in the Indian capital Delhi, where faith, superstition, hope and abandonment exist alongside one another. Rooted in my own upbringing in Lucknow, where the existence of these supernatural entities and their powers is a common belief, the project examines the contradiction between what I was taught about Djinns and what I witnessed being practised at the fortress. Shot on 35mm film and a digital camera with a scratched sensor, the work focuses on the rituals and practices that take place at the fortress along with the lives, petitions and injustices of devotees whose hopes are often exploited in the name of superstition and credulous belief. A Displaced Hope is a personal journal of my childhood, my culture and my folklore, blending personal experiences with a critique of contemporary beliefs and practices surrounding Djinn worship within the Kotla fortress, marked by political neglect, religious difference and historical erasure.

The project is a photographic series of sixty-five artworks created over the course of five and a half years. The work operates as a living archive of spaces and beliefs that no longer exist in the form in which I encountered them. All the areas of the Kotla fortress where these practices once took place have been closed by the Archaeological Survey of India, bringing centuries-old informal rituals to an abrupt end. In doing so, A Displaced Hope preserves a fragile cultural ecology that has now vanished, giving the work a lasting archival relevance as a record of faith, superstition and lived histories that have been erased through institutional intervention.