Heads or tales?: A new photo project focuses on the stray dogs of Goa
With few humans in the frame, Rain Dogs offers an unusual perspective: the interior lives of dogs, a species we're used to seeing with their eyes trained on us.
“I grew up in a time when a white Pomeranian was a status symbol,” says photographer Rohit Chawla, laughing.
As a teen in the 1980s, he dreamed of having a pet. His father, a bureaucrat, wouldn’t hear of it. “He always thought we were too middle-class for a pet,” he adds.
Decades later, after various solo exhibitions around the world, featuring powerful art and award-winning photography projects, Chawla is exhibiting what he calls “the project closest to my heart”.
A fortnight-long show titled Rain Dogs opened on January 2 at Goa’s Aguad Port & Jail Complex. It documents stray dogs photographed in the beach state, during the pandemic. After Goa, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Camera Centre in Gurugram (January 26 to February 14).
A photobook titled Rain Dogs (HarperCollins), featuring the photographs printed alongside essays by Vikram Seth, Orijit Sen, Jeet Thayil, Javed Akhtar and others, on their relationships with dogs, will be launched at the Jaipur Literature Festival in February.
A calendar featuring some of the works, sponsored by investment firm Hunch Ventures, has also been released, with proceeds from these sales going towards dog charities in the country.
“The term ‘rain dogs’ metaphorically refers to people who feel lost or out of place, much like dogs in the rain. It’s often used to describe feelings of alienation or displacement... it was what I experienced during the pandemic,” Chawla says.
Stray thoughts
It all began in the monsoon of 2021. With the world still largely shuttered, Chawla was trying to decide how to spend the seemingly endless months of the pandemic. He decided to move to Goa, to try to craft a project by the sea.
After 40 years of living largely on the road, he found himself holed up in a sea-facing room at a deserted hotel in Ashwem. On the beach, every day, he began to notice the strays.
“In all our scrambling for food in those days, some hoarding away more than they needed, these dogs had been forgotten,” he says.
Chawla began to capture them on camera. Unlike his human subjects, he couldn’t manipulate or coax them to do his bidding. Neither could he predict what mood they, the stormy weather or the sea would be in.
He became entranced by the lack of control, and by the exhilaration of capturing the perfect shot with a range of subjects that didn’t care that he was there.
Chawla had started his career in advertising, and served as creative director at India Today between 2013 and 2016. A campaign titled Untangling the Politics of Hair, for the design magazine Stir, earned a Gold Lion in the Industry Craft category at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in a rare such win for India.
Now, in a time of isolation, uncertainty and social distancing, the sight of packs waiting by the water together, or sitting scattered along wet sand, tugged at him, he says.
Though he fed them when he could, he believes their bond was rooted in something more. Could they have known that they were, in a strange way, keeping him afloat?
The truth is, Chawla was mourning a deep loss of his own, when he arrived in Goa.
He had finally ended up with a pet, in a most unexpected way, some years earlier.
In 2006, he returned from an extended international tour to find that his wife, Saloni Puri, director of programming at The Quorum culture club, had adopted a Labrador retriever named Jaan. He was taken aback at first. He didn’t feel he had the place in his life for a dog. In days, Jaan had melted his heart. He hadn’t imagined he could love a pet so deeply, Chawla says.
Even when the dog accidentally knocked a hard drive out of his hand, causing him to lose more than 6,000 images taken on the trip, “I couldn’t bring myself to be angry with him”.
Jaan died just before the pandemic began.
And so, out there in Goa, he ended up taking more than 10,000 photographs of stray dogs.
When he looked at them later, he says, he found that they told a story larger than he had intended.
With people largely absent from the frames, the series offers an unusual view: a rare look at the interior lives of dogs, a species we are used to seeing with their eyes focused on us.
“In some ways, the pictures tell a deeply political story too,” Chawla says, “and I share these images with the thought that that story might resonate with others who, in one way or another, may have been where I was. I hope to sensitise people to look at strays differently.”
He certainly does. Since the beginning of this project, Chawla and Puri, who now live in Goa, have taken in three abandoned strays: Marco, Polo and Hero.
“We take pride in all things Indian, like our music, from our bhangra to our indigenous rap,” Chawla says. “This pride should extend to our indies too. They are ‘Made in India’, after all.”
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