Towards an Indian Gay Image, Lake Pichola, Udaipur

Born in New Delhi, Sunil Gupta immigrated with his family to Canada in 1969 at the age of fifteen. He returned to India in 1980, having received a student award from Thames Television to photograph rural poverty in Rajasthan. While traveling through New Delhi, Gupta—who is gay—became interested in documenting urban gay life there. However, he learned that although a gay community existed, nothing happened publicly, and men certainly would not want to be photographed. Frustrated, Gupta staged a few photographs of anonymous men purportedly cruising in various locations around Delhi, which resulted in a group of fourteen gelatin-silver prints that, until 2020, were rarely exhibited or published, and were later titled Towards an Indian Gay Image.

Unlike the straightforward photojournalism and personal photography projects Gupta had previously created, these are conceptually driven, constructed images, with Delhi not merely as a backdrop for the experiences of gay men, but as a subject itself. For ethical reasons, Gupta decided against simply taking pictures of men furtively meeting during the unaccounted hours between the end of the workday and dinner, stepping outside of their conventional family lives to have a casual tryst. Instead, he insisted on the visual presence of historical landmarks, recalling a type of nineteenth-century colonial photography that exulted in the beauty of archaeological sites often evacuated of people, effectively erasing all indications of the society in which they existed. By foregrounding the bodies of his volunteers, their gazes averted from the camera toward these monuments, Gupta inverts and refutes this erasure, expressly confirming the presence of these men and the culture of cruising in the fabric of Delhi.

This particular image, taken from an elevated vantage point in Udaiput, is the sole documentary, unstaged image in the group, with gay subjects looking out at Lake Pichola. It was later used for the cover of Jeremy Seabrook’s 1998 book, Colonies of the Heart, which includes a fictional story about the relationship between an older Englishman and a younger Indian athlete.