Striking Photos Of Women In Burqas That Cast Away Stereotypes

Beyond The VeilKanishka Mukherjee

A camera to Kanishka Mukherjee, a Kolkata-based boy, was akin to a forbidden fruit. Yet, just like Adam went and plucked that juicy apple, Kanishka experimented with his father’s Asahi Pentax Spotmatic camera pretending to be a photographer whenever he was not in the house. However, this hobby of his lay forgotten over the years, until in 2012 he began to click pictures with a point-and-shoot camera, followed by a DSLR.

His first photo series, ‘The Un-Cinderella Men’ was about three brothers belonging from a very poor family who were aspiring to become boxers. It gained appreciation from several platforms and even got featured in a national daily ‘The Statesman’ and the boys received aid from many sources. Mukherjee’s latest photo series, Beyond The Veil, has been inspired by human behaviour. It focuses on burqa-clad women, who are often treated unequally or with suspicion. He tries to break this notion by clicking photographs of a woman wearing a burqa going about her day as any other person. His aim is to break the misconception that wearing a burqa is an obligation and wanted to portray that many women wear it by choice and are capable of doing anything they want irrespective of their religious choices.

“I wanted to portray that people, irrespective of their cultural choices, are just the same. What a person wears or does is their choice and that goes for the burqa equally as much as it goes for the bikini,” he says. Kanishka is currently working on a new project that he cannot disclose but hopes to get the same kind of praise from his audience. He is currently employed at The State Bank of India. His gear includes Nikon D5100, a Nikkor 18-105mm lens, and a Nikkor 35 mm 1.8g lens.