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: It started off as a little girl’s wish to see the country of which her grandmother told stories. Sadia Shepard’s visit to India has turned out into her first solo exhibition as a photographer. ‘Bene Israel: The Jews Of Maharashtra’ opened in Mumbai last Friday, and will show at Cymroza Art Gallery until November 15.
Ms Shepard is a US-based documentary filmmaker whose films have been appreciated at major festivals like Sundance, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Though she has been to India before, this is the first time Ms Shepard is “really living here”.
Last year, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the Jews in Mumbai and the rest of the Konkan Coast. Most of the 4,000 strong community in India lives in this region. For Ms Shepard, this scholarship was a godsend given that she always wanted to document the community to which her maternal grandmother belonged.
Her show has around 70 colour photographs that depict the Jewish way of life, especially its synagogues and festivals. Ms Shepard will now prepare a documentary of her experiences, and she also hopes to take this exhibition to New Delhi and New York. “Of course, before that, I want to put up my photographs at the Jewish community centre in Mumbai. I want the people whom this is about to see my work.”
One asks whether the Jews in India are vastly different from the ones she has known in America. “Oh, they are so integrated with the local Maharashtrian community here!” she reports. “They speak Marathi like it were their native tongue!”
Despite the fact that the Jews have been in India for 2,000 years, Ms Shepard thinks there is a danger of them being lost to this country for ever, emigration is so high. In that sense, she says, her photo exhibits are an elegy. “But I certainly don’t want people to think they are going to Israel because they fear for their lives in India. The truth is that ever since the Jewish state was founded in 1948, Jews from all over the world are migrating to it. They feel they belong there. Some of them here said to me, ‘India is our motherland, but Israel is our fatherland’,” Ms Shepard says. “Personally, I am completely fascinated by the fact that India is the only country in the world where Jews have escaped anti-Semitism.”
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