Ripples in the Pond by Bharat Sikka

A photobook by Indian photographer Bharat Sikka.

In Ripples in the Pond, the artist undertakes a nuanced exploration of Makharda, a peripheral township on the outskirts of Kolkata, West Bengal. Situated within a landscape marked by over twenty tranquil ponds, Makharda emerges not merely as a geographic locale but as a site of complex temporal and socio-cultural convergence. Through a process-based photographic inquiry, the artist renders visible the entanglements between memory, modernity, and the slow violence of infrastructural encroachment.

The project is grounded in a personal act of return, both physical and affective, evoking the fictional sensibilities of ‘Malgudi Days’, an Indian TV series from the 80s, which serves here not simply as a nostalgic reference, but as an aesthetic framework through which to understand the semi-rural imaginary. The ponds, recurrent throughout the body of work, function symbolically and formally as reflective agents, at once literal bodies of water and metaphoric surfaces that refract the tensions between past and present, fantasy and reality, and the rural and the emergent urban.

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Title: Ripples in the Pond
Artist: Bharat Sikka
Publisher: Fw: Books, 2025
Format: softcover, cahier
Size: 260 x 325 mm
Pages: 152
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-90-835197-6-0

*Due to the way of binding, the edges of this book are fragile and can be a bit dented.