Gaurav Jain

This Grant was amicably cancelled based on reasons mutually agreed upon by the Grantee and IFA due to unavoidable circumstances.

Gaurav Jain is a Bangalore-based editor and journalist. Over the past 15 years, he has taught creative writing, and journalism in India and abroad. He has worked as Literary Editor and Senior Journalist at Tehelka, and is the co-founder of Grist Media, an experimental media house and Ladies Finger, a public interest digital magazine for women. This grant enables Gaurav to undertake a photography-based exploration of the phenomenon of 'Random Amit' in Bangalore, which reinforces the stereotype of the brash North Indian male who has migrated into the city. 

It is not entirely clear where the usage of Bangalore’s Amit comes from. But given its short history, its ‘official’ etymology can be traced to recent years on social media. One person on social media attributes its dissemination to the writer Kris Ashok and observes that it is certainly a pejorative. However, Kris Ashok makes a different etymological claim in his 2017 essay on Buzzfeed called North Indian Media – Going South in More ways Than One. He says that his friend Harish coined the term in 2007, and that Amit describes a ‘certain specific kind of North Indian cluelessness, a form of ignorant arrogance wrapped in exuberant overconfidence and dipped liberally in the ketchup of intolerance’. 

It is from here that this project titled Being Amit springs. It draws inspiration from several other well-known artistic projects, including filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s 2006 documentary Where’s Sandra, which explores stereotypes of catholic girls from the Mumbai suburb Bandra and through it covers an entire slice of Mumbai’s history and the women who shaped its culture. Another trigger for this project comes from artist and curator Anita Dube’s project where she photographed other Anitas. What happens to your name when you travel far from home? What if your rather simple, almost mundane first name suddenly stands in for a whole group? How do you differentiate your own identity from this mass while adhering to your rooted sense of where you came from? In other words, how do the ‘Random Amits’ of Bangalore remain their own specific Amit in their heads? These are some of the questions that the project will attempt to unravel. The project, of course, is not about ‘victims’ or about feeling sorry for Amits. It is about finding the hidden moments of sensitivity about identity that we sometimes encounter. 

Through the year, Gaurav will photograph and interview North Indian men living in Bangalore, whose first names are Amit. Using the mediums of photography and text, propagated in a participatory mode through Instagram and offline encounters, the project will interrogate the popular, humorous, and pejorative nickname Amit. It will explore the subjects’ sense (or lack) of inhabiting this idea of one monolithic, homogeneous North Indian identity in a fast-changing Bangalore. In a way, it will also examine the ‘Amit-ness’ of Bangalore. Gaurav will maintain an Instagram account where he will invite Amits in Bangalore to publish an image of their favourite Bangalore activity or space. He will publish an image and a poem from each interview he conducts. 

The project will culminate in a photo exhibition of the diversities of Bangalore’s Amits. This exhibition will include Gaurav’s own photographs, a selection of photos from a pool of images crowd-sourced online and relevant interview excerpts. Deliverables from this project will be the photographs and texts from the exhibition, still and video documentation of the exhibition, the crowd-sourced materials, and recordings of the interviews.