In 2005, after having completed his Masters in Philosophy, a young man named Anshuman Sen arrived at the Trilochan Ghat in Varanasi — also known as Benares or Kashi — with a backpack, a Nikon F4 camera and a few rolls of film. A “city boy” who had never bathed in a river, Anshuman found himself following the local lodge owner, Mishraji, into the Ganga for a morning dip every day. Living in Room No. 1 of Mishra Lodge — a room with distinctive blue windows that he rented for ₹60 per-night — he found himself capturing the unselfconscious rhythm of the ghats, and finding both calm and chaos in the narrow lanes of the holy city of Kashi.
Photographs from Kashi
| Photo Credit:
Anshuman Sen
Anshuman’s plan was to return to Delhi and compile a photo book on Varanasi, but he could not get himself to do so. “I lost my nerve,” he candidly confesses, “I decided to do commercial work, so I could earn money and that is what I did for the next two decades or so.” And so, the raw, intimate transparencies of Varanasi were tucked into a box, nearly forgotten for 21 years as he climbed the ranks of commercial photography, shooting over 300 luxury hotels and countless magazine covers over the years.
Anshuman feels that somewhere down the line — chasing commercial success — he lost the person that he was. It took a profound personal loss — his mother passed away in a car accident two years ago — and a chance encounter with those dusty slides during a studio cleanup to bring that “lost person” back. “It was a turning point in my life. I started questioning what I have done all these years and I realised I haven’t done anything substantial for myself,” he says. He quit commercial photography and found solace in painting. On a whim, he even booked a gallery to hold an exhibition for his artworks, only to realise he would not have enough canvases ready in time for the showcase.
Photographs from Kashi
| Photo Credit:
Anshuman Sen
What could have been a display of his paintings, is now an exhibition of 48 images from his three trips made in 2005 to Varanasi. Not only is it a showcase of a city; it is a homecoming for the artist himself. Devoid of the typical tourist spectacles of aartis and temples, these photographs capture the quiet laya (rhythm) of the everyday: a boy doing homework, dancers on a rooftop, and men sitting cross-legged and playing chess on the streets. “The appeal of the city for me is the Banarasi. Within the chaos of the city, they radiate calm,” he says, adding how they were self-conscious and often looked directly into the camera.
While in Varanasi, he also came across author Pankaj Mishra’s novel The Romantics about a young man’s journey in the city. “The book made me look at the city with a different perspective. It made me think every Banarasi is a romantic because even though many of them don’t have much, they still enjoy life to the fullest,” he shares.
Photographs from Kashi
| Photo Credit:
Anshuman Sen
The 48-year-old photographer, whose skill behind the camera has evolved over the years, looks back with a lot of fondness at the young man that he was all those years ago. “There was a certain innocence and a purity which I am trying to find again and this exhibition is the first step towards it,” says Anshuman, who now wants to focus on his paintings and compiling earlier photography works for exhibitions and books — the first of which will be the photo book on Varanasi he had originally planned back in 2005. For Anshuman , not only has this exhibition turned out to be more than a retrospective of the holy city, it has also become the bold first step in a long-overdue journey back to himself.
Kashi is on display at Academy of Fine Arts and Literature, New Delhi, from March 25 to 31.
Published – March 25, 2026 07:00 am IST
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