Lay of the land
Photographer Indrajit Khambe captures Maharashtra’s farms and fishing communities with the grace of a painter.
Welcome to the Good Food Movement’s newsletter What Goes Inside?, a monthly dispatch about the things that made our team curious, re-energised, and stop in our tracks. Here, we’ll share notes from reporting assignments, meditations on nature and the climate, and connect the dots between what we eat and the planet we inhabit.
This month, we have a guest newsletter by Zahra Amiruddin, a writer, photographer and educator whom I’ve had the pleasure of accompanying on many journalistic field trips. Zahra has an inimitable, magical ability to slow down time—the crash of a wave on a shore, the flight of a bird—in her photographs. In this edition of What Goes Inside?, she is in conversation with fellow photographer Indrajit Khambe, whose mesmeric documentation of rural Maharashtra you are sure to come across on Instagram. His is a photographic practice born from spending time on fields and farms. I like to think of Indrajit’s images and videos as the internet’s collective rest stop: a place where you can catch your breath, between news updates and branded content.—Neerja Deodhar, Editorial Lead
Have you ever seen a photograph that seamlessly captures the scent of the scene it’s showcasing? Or where you can hear the laughter, or feel the wind in the distance, and suddenly, your fingers tingle with the textures that your eyes are slowly absorbing? It takes more than mere observation of light and composition for this to surface, and it calls for an intimacy and attachment towards what one is photographing.
For this reason, I have been a huge admirer of Sindhudurg-based photographer Indrajit Khambe’s work for many years now. His documentation of the region, situated near the Goa-Maharashtra border, is a gateway into a world that he seems to be discovering with honesty and a sense of wonderment.
His photographs wield light and colour with a painterly grace.
Buffalos bathe in a lake that’s surrounded by lush green fluorescence, and a farmer strolls by as his white lungi catches the wind. In another frame, bright sarees unfold slowly, forming a fence around crops that are hidden behind their patterned translucence. The image, captured in Indrajit’s gaze, is striking and reminiscent of the ‘tranquillity’ that he is in search of according to his Instagram bio.
The ‘saree-fence’ serves a larger purpose for the farmers in Sindhudurg, who use it as barriers to protect their fields from bison, wild boars, and strolling cattle.
Interestingly, these sarees are borrowed from families in the neighbourhood, in return for the vegetables and crops that are grown in the protected fields.
“It is this idea of community, and the emotional connection that is formed, that stayed with me,” says Indrajit on a video call from his home in the district.
At Goa’s Serendipity Arts Festival, 2025, Indrajit and I shared space in an exhibition about our perceptions of home. In large-size photographs that stretched across a canvas like mesmerising oil paintings, he allowed us a glimpse into his village through its everyday life, without an urgency to romanticise it. He tells me how, as a 12-year-old, he would wander into the fields with his painting material and extensively interpret the scenes in front of him. In fact, it was a dream that he wanted to pursue, but which fell short because of resources and parental disapproval at the time.
Since he wasn’t encouraged on the artistic front, sunsets brought with them a sense of dread for young Indrajit. The art he made at this time is the diametric opposite of the kind he makes today: four paintings from his childhood that he recently re-discovered all showcase bare trees with abandoned nests, lone leaves, and a sinking sun.
Ever since he found photography purely by chance a decade ago, his wanderings in his locality nudged a new life, and he began observing the landscape with a close eye. This is evident in his images of monsoons in Sindhudurg, where he documents agricultural families from the oldest to the youngest members, uniting in the fields to plant and subsequently harvest rice. Limbs are covered in mud, and there is a swift ease with which everything works, like clockwork. It is these seasonal shifts that Indrajit is most interested in, that he mentions are barely noticeable in city life.
A lot of what he is drawn to emerges from childhood experiences. For instance, he mentions how he would spend his summer holidays in his grandparents’ home in Satara—a district affected by drought. This meant that he was given the duty to wait in line to fill buckets from water tankers, and after his Class 10 board exams, he spent two months there with his uncle in the bare fields. With not much farming to do, a young Indrajit would collect seeds in Satara, and then go home to Sindhudurg and sow them. Over the next three months, he would watch them grow during the monsoon, and this instantly sparked a joyful relationship with the rain.
Recently, Indrajit’s series on the attire worn by fisherwomen in Harnai, a fascinating beach near Dapoli, travelled far distances through the trellises of the internet. In close-up images that capture the details of the ornaments as well as clothes of fisherwomen in their 60s, the photographer subconsciously acts as an archivist, recording traditions that are slowly disappearing. In unique, intricately designed gold jewellery, we see glimpses of fish motifs in earrings and clusters of bangles in the foreground of their catch.
Indrajit mentions that he has been photographing the community since 2018, and has learnt that the jewels serve as badges of honour, signifying the labour undertaken by the women who invest their lives’ earnings in gold. They wear their livelihoods proudly, as they continue to carry out their work while wearing the traditional Maharashtrian Nauvari saree that is known for its unique dhoti-style drape, allowing them to move freely. This is slowly changing with the younger generation as gold prices have sky-rocketed, and their preferences lie in simple salwar kurtas and pajamas.
Since the image-maker isn’t recording these scenes for anybody other than himself, there is a lightness that he brings to the documentary process: a dog relaxes in a pool of glinting water, children form a make-shift cricket pitch in the plains, rain clings ever-so-slightly on a resting buffalo’s skin, and ribbonfish dry in intriguing patterns.
His Instagram serves as a visual diary of the interiors of Maharashtra, through the perspective of someone who has been living there over the past 45 years. Having dabbled in computers, theatre, and then finally finding honesty in photography, Indrajit revels in the fact that his stories are being told on his own terms. On our call, he says that after a workshop with the National School of Drama, he was struck by the thought that art is not something which you can invest in part-time and pursue as a full-time profession. Having dedicated ten years to quiet observation, his photographs are testament to the tales of a land that moves in a rhythm, lilting in the riyaaz with which he documents it.
You can follow more of Indrajit Khambe’s work here.