Across India’s agricultural landscape, an irreversible shift is underway. Climate change is reshaping what the land can grow, and by extension, how people live. Crops once rooted in local ecosystems, cuisines, and cultural practices are increasingly being pushed to the margins, many on the brink of disappearing altogether.
Red okra from Karnataka, black rice from Gujarat, and red corn from Tamil Nadu are traditional varieties now struggling with erratic rainfall and rising temperatures. Wild fruits like 'raayan', mountain berries like 'timru', and native millets such as 'kuri' are rarely seen anymore. Odisha’s forest-grown mushrooms 'amba chhatu' and 'bali chhatu' are becoming elusive. Even kokum, long a staple of coastal cuisines, may not survive the coming decades. These are not just agricultural losses. They signal a shift in memory, practice, and identity.
It’s this intimate entanglement between land, crop, and identity that becomes the theme of Becoming a Butterfly, a conceptual photo series by Saurabh Narang — a Germany-based photographer and visual artist whose work explores themes of climate, culture, and migration. Shot in collaboration with Indian organic farmers, the series is both a document and a proposition: that the disappearance of a crop often coincides with the disappearance of the farmer’s place in the cultural imagination.
The images render the farmers as part of the landscape they tend — not in a romantic sense, but in a way that reflects the blurring of identities when the land itself becomes unstable. In one approach, Narang photographed the farmers, printed the portraits, overlaid them with the very crops they grow. In another, farmers wore face masks made from their plants.
Covering the face, a traditionally defining marker of identity, shifts attention to the crop — now the carrier of selfhood. It’s an inversion, one that brings the viewer face-to-face with the reality that for many farmers, their sense of self is increasingly fragile, tied to an environment they can no longer depend on.
Narang’s collaboration with the farmers is central to the work. This is not an imposed aesthetic, but one co-developed through shared conversations, materials, and intent. The photographs reflect a layered authorship — a meeting point of art, agriculture, and survival.
The titular 'butterfly' which is symbolic of transformation, echoes the farmers' own journey. As they strive to preserve disappearing wild and local plant species, the fight against their own erasure and reclaim their cultural sovereignty.
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