Fights, festivals, fear: Sohrab Hura's angst-ridden India.

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With his photographs of out-of-control hedonism, punch-ups and blood-letting rituals, Hura captures a nation in the grip of an angry new nationalism.

Theatre, or real-life drama? Detail from The Fight, a violent scene in Hura’s book The Coast. Photograph: Sohrab Hura/Magnum Photos
▼ S ohrab Hura’s photobook, The Coast, begins with a fantastical short story written by him. It features Madhu, a woman whose head has been stolen by her obsessive lover. She is awaiting the arrival of “an idiot of a photographer” who wants to capture her and “all the wonderful and vicious things that happened along the Indian coastline”.
The images that follow are indeed wonderful and vicious, almost hallucinatory in their intensity: lovers embrace, angry men come to blows, revellers are caught in closeup, eyes bloodshot, faces daubed with powdered paint, lips smeared with lipstick. Moments of violence are caught in the flashbulb’s glare: a machete drips blood on a bare foot, a man holds a brick above another man he has pinned to the pavement, a woman stares in terror at something – or someone – just out of the frame.I was tapping into the discomfort I was feeling wandering the streets at night, but also as someone immersed in the language of social media. What is true, what is fake?
Throughout, Hura merges the real and the fictional, the found and the constructed, his harsh, unforgiving flash illuminating what he calls “the loneliness and suspicion of the Indian night”. In its raw immediacy, the book reflects what he describes as “the non-aesthetic of so many of the images uploaded on social  media, which has now become an aesthetic in itself”. The result is one of the most powerfully unsettling photobooks of the year.
“Many of the images in the book are real,” he continues, “but I have messed around with them afterwards. I have also witnessed and tried to defuse real fights. So, some of it is theatre, some of it real-life drama. I’m playing with ideas of voyeurism and trust, manipulating the viewer. Nothing is definite, everything is raw and overwhelming. This is the image world we now live in.”

Harsh flash … an image simply titled India, from 2014. Photograph: Sohrab Hura/Magnum Photos
The idiot photographer mocked by his character, Madhu – “Why on Earth would anybody waste time on something like this?” – is, of course Hura himself, but also, he tells me, the voyeuristic viewer. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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