In March 2024, my partner Soumya (SJ) and I were in India for a family wedding. Between the chaos of ceremonies, a wisdom tooth extraction saga, and my complete inability to switch off, we managed to work on something deeply personal: a photo zine collaboration with my grandmother, Dida, and Soumya’s mother, Soma.

Just a few months earlier, I’d completed my MA in Cultural & Creative Industries at King’s College London, where I discovered a love for arts-based research. I did a mix of photovoice, documentary photography, and creative non-fiction writing (CNF), which completely shifted how I think about storytelling (don’t be shy—go check out the project here!). Participatory storytelling, at its core, is one of collaboration and agency that asks: What happens when the subjects become the storytellers?

A little BTS: Before heading to India, we set up a WhatsApp group with Dida and Soma. I shared prompts to help them brainstorm photos that best represented their dreams, goals, hopes, their unmet aspirations. They used their phones to capture moments they felt best answered these prompts. While in Kolkata, Soumya recreated their images with his camera over two days, staying true to their original vision. After the photos were taken, Dida and Soma handwrote captions for each one. These captions added context, a window into their thought processes. Back in our little London studio, Soumya and I printed the photos and spread them out on our coffee table. It was a hands-on, tactile process—shuffling photos around before he ultimately designed the zine in InDesign, integrating the handwritten captions with the photos to create the final book.

Yes, so this zine is, first and foremost, about Dida and Soma. My Dida is a woman of many talents—a writer, boutique owner, a really great swimmer, driver, cook—but her life has largely revolved around her role as a homemaker. Soma, a Kathak dancer with a PhD under the legendary Pandit Birju Maharaj, gave up her career as a performing artist to support her husband’s diplomatic postings around the world. This project gave us the chance to slow down and listen—to really understand the work, love, and resilience that shape their lives. But then again, their stories aren’t unique in the sense that they’re emblematic of systemic inequalities that render women’s work invisible. Consider this: Indian women rank 2nd globally in unpaid care and domestic work (Sanghera, 2019). 90% of Indian women perform unpaid domestic work, compared to just 27% of men (Manaktala et al., 2023).Women in India spend 7.2 hours daily on domestic work—577% more time than men (ET News, 2023). If this unpaid labour were compensated, it would contribute an estimated 7.5% to India’s GDP (Raghavan, 2023).

Through their stories, we hope to make the invisible visible. Maybe acknowledging this labour is the first step toward valuing it—and valuing it is the first step toward larger systemic change. Have a watch of the video as we flip through the pages of the zine—this is our love letter to Dida, Soma, and all the women do their best to quietly hold everything together, in families everywhere.