UDAY BHATIA interviews MUKUL DUBE
Mukul Dube’s photograph of protests against violence in the Gaza Strip outside the Israeli Embassy, New Delhi.
Mukul Dube, 64, is many things — writer, editor, expert coffee maker, author of Path of the Parivar and Razia and Her Pink Elephant. He’s also a photographer with an unusual area of interest. Since 2010, Dube has been documenting Delhi agitations and protests concerning everything from the rights of forest dwellers to the removal of the A.K. Ramanujan essay Three Hundred Ramayanas from the undergraduate history syllabus of Delhi University. Earlier this year, his work was collected as part of an online archive. Excerpts from the interview below.
Q. How did the archive come together?
A. I used to save the pictures on my computer. Last year, Harsh Kapoor [who runs the South Asia Citizens Web, or SACW] said, “You’ve been taking these photos for so many years, why don’t we make an archive?” So I took the photographs of each protest, put them in separate folders, and sent 50-something folders on a CD to him. He took about a year to put them up on Photobucket. It’s up to 99 folders now, which reminds me of this story about these two brothers, one rich but unhappy, the other poor and happy. The wealthy one, to trouble his brother, gives him a bag with 99 asharfis. At first, the poor brother was happy, but then he became consumed with how to make his 99 into 100. I’m in that situation right now…
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Q. Do you consider either writing or photography as a primary job?
A. It is different at different times. I never had one main profession. For instance, I’m also an excellent motorcycle mechanic. I never did this commercially, of course, but for two years, I lived in a post-graduate hostel in DU called Jubilee Hall. At the time, there were no more than one dozen two-wheelers there. Scooters I couldn’t handle, but on Sundays, there’d be a collective washing and servicing of motorbikes, for which I was much in demand. I’d do ignition adjustments, carburetor cleaning — and charge one bottle of beer, which at that time used to cost six to eight rupees.
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