- Ancestry In I
- Past Connections to Modern Relations
- Photography: Lakshmi Narayana Rao Satyavolu
- Archiving, Renovation, and Editing: Pranav Volety
- Context and Stories: Nagamani Vaddadi
“Ancestry in I” began this summer with an object that reframed my understanding of image-making. In the bottom of my late grandmother’s cabinet, I found a velvet-lined book of breathtaking landscapes and striking portraits taken by my great-great-grandfather, Lakshmi Narayan Sathyavolu. During journeys to Kedarnath and to the borderlands between British Raj India and pre-occupation Tibet, he carried a camera into places rarely documented on their own terms. The book functioned as an archive, holding faces, dress, terrain, and everyday presence. Encountering it made clear how easily the contemporary act of photographing can be taken for granted.
The project is rooted in the same spirit as my longitudinal work “Nangpa”, which studies Tibetan diaspora, late-stage memoricide, and rebellion through spirituality, alongside the political histories that shape what survives and what is silenced. “Ancestry in I” extends that inquiry through lineage: not as biography, but as a method. I returned to elders, listened to stories shaped by Partition, and traced how ideological currents, Gandhians and Leftists alike, moved through family memory and into the present. What emerged was a cyclical pattern of attention: a recurrence of sensibilities across generations, and a repetition of the impulse to witness.
This work is also an examination of authorship and responsibility. To photograph is to be positioned, to be granted access, to be entrusted. Influenced by conversations about archive, kinship, community, and spiritual lineage, the project treats the archive not as static storage but as a living relationship between people, land, and memory. A century after my ancestor’s travels, the camera returns to a related question in a different geography: Tibetan diaspora in the United States, and the ways displacement is carried forward through images.
Many of the Tibetan people represented in this collection are likely part of a broader history of forced movement tied to the Chinese state’s occupation and ongoing repression of Tibet. The photographs do not claim to fully explain that history, but they sit inside it. What feels most urgent is the proximity of context: how often the evidence of a world is held within families, within cabinets and books, while public narratives search elsewhere for proof.