Dear Nani

Dear Nani is a project that addresses issues of gender performance and colonial mimicry through the family archive.

The photographs included in this project are of my maternal grandmother, Rhubab Tapal, or Nani. Nani is performing the act of cross-dressing by wearing several different outfits that belong to her husband. The photographs were taken on her honeymoon after the couple was newly married in Quetta and Karachi Pakistan, in 1948. My grandfather or Nana, Gulam Abbas Tapal, is the photographer and presumed director of the photo session.

Homi K. Bhabha states in his essay Of Mimicry and Man, "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.[1]" My grandparents fit into a class of Indians who, at the time, were educated under British rule. The British spent a large amount of time and resources to educate Indian men, to create a class of men that were Indian in blood but British in character. These images were taken only a single year after the partition of India and Pakistan, at a time when the two nations had been recently wounded and struggling to find peace and order.

As Nani holds a Children's Encyclopaedia produced for subjects of the British colonies, she is performing not only the role of man, but also, an Indian man performing the role of a British man. As I try to understand these images I put myself into the unanswered questions. I try on the role of my Nani as well as some of the other contributors to the images, such as the unknown children in the background. The fictional dialogue between Nani and I attempts to unpack some of the questions surrounding these images while also asking the viewer to revisit their own reading.