The school where this was taken is in a village in rural Uttar Pradesh, the state in northern India where I was born. It’s a poverty-ridden area and this is a poorly funded school, with few books and no electricity. My father taught there for 35 years, throughout my entire life, but it’s not the school I attended.
When I was two, I started repeating crude words I’d picked up from older boys. My father’s response was to sell off his inheritance, take out massive bank loans and send me to an elite boarding school in the Himalayas. For the next 18 years, my parents could only afford to live in a tiny shack – their bedroom doubled as a kitchen and they shared an outside toilet. These were pretty drastic measures, but my father was determined to give me the best possible chance of escaping the environment I’d been born into. The new world I entered could not have been more different. I’d spend the holidays with my parents in their modest circumstances, only to return to a school with sprawling grounds, where my friends were the sons of top businessmen, politicians and Bollywood stars.
By the time my dad retired in 2020, I’d been living in the UK for over a decade. I had moved to London to study photography before getting married and settling in Oxford. I was working as a fashion photographer and also on my own creative projects. I had never visited the school where my father had spent his entire working life, but as the time approached for him to leave I felt a sudden urge to go there and photograph it. The first time I asked, he said no. I’m not sure he really understood my motives. I’m not certain I did, either.
In the end, it was my wife who persuaded him that my request came from a good place, that my interest was born out of love. It turned out my mum had never been to the school, either – when I finally visited, she came too. Everyone had been told I was coming and they were dressed in their best clothes. The students were a little apprehensive at first. I think some were surprised that I spoke fluent Hindi, but I tried to spend time with each one, talking about their studies and asking what they wanted to do when they grew up.
I took lots of pictures and we had some fun, but this is the photograph where the ice was really broken. I lined the boys up under the tree for a very traditional-style school photograph and initially they were all sitting and standing straight and looking very serious. I said: “Could you all settle your hair?” Then, when they started combing with their fingers, I said: “No, that’s not good enough.” Their movements became much more vigorous and there was laughter. That’s when I pressed the button.
Girls and boys don’t really mingle at the school. I took a photograph of the girls in a similar pose but it’s much more reserved. I couldn’t really get them to relax, which demonstrates the way traditional gender dynamics still hold sway in India, especially outside the big cities. My dad and his colleagues appear in some of the photographs but I don’t think he really got what I was doing. Two years on, he does look back fondly on that day, but when I later told him the series had been published in Italian Vogue and that I’d given a talk about it to 400 people, he was utterly bemused.
I called the series The Education I Never Had. It occurred to me that if my parents had made different decisions, I could easily have been one of these children. Many of them may have greater gifts than me, but no matter how talented or intelligent, they might never get the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Photography wasn’t the career my parents had in mind for me, but both are glad I am happy in what I do and have chosen my own path. My mum likes some of my work, though she refers to my more surreal images as “horror pictures” and wonders why I don’t take more photographs of flowers.
Vikram Kushwah’s CV
Born: Delhi, India, 1983
Trained: London College of Communication; University for the Creative Arts, Rochester.
Influences: “Previously: Deborah Turbeville, Francesca Woodman, Sarah Moon, Anna Gaskell, Tim Walker, Guy Bourdin. Currently: the people and stories I come across and the love within.”
High point: “Creating my series The Education I Never Had, and when some of it was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London, as part of the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize, 2019.”
Low point: “My laptop bag was stolen in London in early 2020. Some of my favourite photographic negatives were in there – from a portrait session with my neighbour John – which had only been scanned as low res images. I was gutted. John and I organised another session in his garden but, before I could take the pictures, he died. This was a low point not just because of the lost negatives but also due to the circumstances surrounding John’s death. He was a lovely man, full of quirks, not adhering to social norms, which is why I had decided to photograph him in the first place.”
Top tip: “If you’re going to create work without letting go, it’s just going to look rigid because it’s rooted in fear. Ground yourself and your work in truthfulness and it will flow like water – free and liberated. In other words, photograph what you love and that which comes from the heart, from a place of intuition. And try not to take photography too seriously.”
