The Self We Translate

The Self We Translate is an ongoing photographic project exploring identity as something continually negotiated through migration, assimilation and belonging.
 

The work begins with my parents’ separate movements from northern to western India and extends into my own migration to the UK. Growing up in western India, I was assimilating into a cultural environment that felt ordinary to me but remained unfamiliar to my parents. Only after moving to the UK myself did I begin to recognise the distance they had been negotiating: the tension between adapting to a new place while carrying the memories and cultural codes of the place they had left behind.
 

Identity is approached not as stable or singular, but as a process of translation. Different versions of the self coexist; some rituals and gestures persist, while others transform or disappear, and new behaviours are absorbed almost unconsciously. The work is less concerned with preserving a cultural identity than with observing how it changes, and how belonging is formed between continuity and adaptation.