Thinking of a place
This work emerges from questions of migration, memory, and belonging shaped by my family’s history and my own fragmented relationship with my place of birth. My paternal grandfather migrated from Sargodha (now in Pakistan) to Allahabad as a 13 year old boy to be a part of the freedom movement in undivided India, never able to return. My mother’s family relocated to Calcutta in 1947 after the partition. What remains of these journeys are only stories, gaps, and silences.
I was born in Allahabad and spent my early childhood there before leaving for boarding school, returning only intermittently over the years. Each return carried a different version of the same city. In 2020, during the lockdown, I came back for an extended period after nearly fifteen years. Confined to the family home, I discovered old photographs and objects that felt like artefacts of lives half-remembered.
As restrictions eased, I began revisiting riversides, playgrounds, homes, and forgotten corners of the city from my childhood. Through this process, I attempt to piece together personal memory with inherited history, tracing what survives, what has shifted, and what has been irrevocably lost.
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Website: raghavgoswamy.com
Instagram: @raghavgoswamy