Gum bichromate prints on fabric;
Cotton, Turmeric, Vermillion, Lace;
2025


The ways we come to know ourselves are shaped as much by inheritance as by absence. Culture is carried through objects, rituals, and expectations but also through the silence of things withheld and the legacies we’re never meant to claim. Womanhood, especially, is passed down like a pattern in cloth: adorned, ritualised, and deeply tied to structures of purity, and lineage.

This project engages with the Rangeeli Pichhodi, a ritual textile from Kumaon gifted to brides as part of their wedding trousseau. Dyed in turmeric and printed with vermilion using a wrapped coin, the fabric carries generations of meaning. It is a symbol of womanhood I was never meant to inherit. As a trans woman, my relationship to it is shaped by both longing and critique.

The work includes gum bichromate prints onto fabric using turmeric and vermilion as the pigments. The prints feature photographs of my mother: the woman I'm supposed to inherit the fabric from, who carries the weight of the fabrics's social expectations of being a wife and a daughter-in-law; and my self-portraits as a daughter who yearns for this fabric as a marker of womanhood. The work moves between this familial disconnect and intimate details of objects associated with femininity in Kumaon, from jewelry like the galoband and ponchi to the brass pot used to carry and store water. This work won the TOTO award for photography 2026.