Varanasi is a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh dating to the 11th century B.C. Regarded as the spiritual capital of India, the city draws Hindu pilgrims who bathe in the Ganges River’s sacred waters and perform funeral rites.
Changes, a part that plays an important role in a person’s life, teaches the person life’s most valuable lessons. People must adopt to the minor and major changes that after their lives daily. A change of mammoth proportion took place in the lives of hundreds of people living in the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi.
A project to construct a pathway between the Kashi Vishwanath temple and the banks of the Ganga ghats require this old city to be cleared up for the path to be built. In the pursuit of development in the rural area, this inevitable change caused habitants to move away from an area they had known home their whole lives.
I captured these moments of the place with the hope that each one tells a story about different individuals who left behind a part of their lives. What was once a place that had sheltered the people generation after generation turned into pieces of bricks and stones. The photos I took contained personal belongings of families who left behind a place they used to call home. Sometimes people leave things behind in the pursuit of something greater of maybe simply because that thing lost its purpose over the years. Whatever the reason, it still remains a fragment of a random memory. Leaving something behind can often be the hardest part of change and as they lay on the ground of Varanasi covered in dust, these are buried with hundreds of stories about laughter and pain and about life.