The Intimacy of Hands is an ongoing photographic documentation of women artisans and their everyday lives, made over several years of working closely with Chhoti Si Asha, a Chandigarh-based organisation working to create sustainable, craft-based livelihoods for women artisans.
I have been closely associated with Chhoti Si Asha since 2022, working alongside the organisation through photography, storytelling and documentation. Over time, the work took me beyond simply photographing the crafts being made. I began returning to the same spaces, meeting the same women, watching their routines unfold, and becoming familiar with the quieter details of their everyday lives.
There were conversations while working, interruptions, questions, stories, teasing, arguments over small things, and a lot of laughter. The sewing machines would keep running in the background. Someone would eventually call for chai. Steel cups would appear, and work would pause for a few minutes.
Those pauses became as important as the photographs themselves.
A cup of chai in a workshop could suddenly bring back the memory of an amma's aangan — afternoons spent sitting around, the sound of women talking somewhere in the background, steel utensils, bangles, familiar clothes, the unremarkable rhythm of everyday life. Memories that seemed almost forgotten would return through something as small as a steel cup held between two hands.
Perhaps this is what the documentation became about for me: not only the craft, and not only the women who make it, but the familiarity of ordinary life.
Chandigarh · 2023—2026
