Ranjit Shankar's Photoseries 'Cuts & Cassettes' Is A Tender Portrait Of Urban Masculinity

Where does a broken-hearted man go? Apparently, to the barber shop. Against the backdrop of old Bollywood songs about lost love, and familiar routines of grooming and small talk, is where he finds his respite. For years, these neighbourhood barbershops have been a cultural fixture, operating as informal social spaces shaped by a strong sense of community. These modest two-three‑chair spaces serve as male sanctuaries of comfort and camaraderie, often intergenerational in clientele and timeless in routine.

Within this iconic milieu lives 'Cuts & Cassettes', a photoseries by Mumbai-based street photographer Ranjit Shankar. Over several months, Ranjit documented these humble spaces capturing what they’ve come to represent beyond a mere haircut. The photographs depict men reclining in peeling‑paint interiors, cassette decks in the corner, posters of Bollywood icons framed by the mirrors, barbers offering massages, fades, and conversation — all part of a ritual that’s slowly fading from the city’s landscape.

Ranjit describes seeing clients who come in requesting 'Salman‑style' or 'Anil‑Kapoor‑style' cuts — language drawn from Bollywood iconography. It becomes a reflection of how popular cinema feeds into masculine self-fashioning, especially in working-class contexts. The 2009 film 'Billu Barber', which centres on a humble village barber and his connection to a Bollywood superstar, tapped directly into this desire — how imitation becomes a form of agency and expression; how haircuts can mirror dreams.

Within these barbershops, we see Salman Khan’s centre-parted curtain cut from 'Tere Naam', Sanjay Dutt’s mullet from the 90s, or Shah Rukh Khan’s dishevelled romance-hero hair from 'Dil Se'. These are styles that are both aspirational and ostensibly time-specific, but they continue to circulate long after they’ve fallen out of favour in elite or globalised spaces.

And so does the music. All Indian and South Asian netizens have now come to agree: you won't find a better heartbreak playlist than the one by bus drivers, construction workers, and barbers. Those unmistakable Hindi songs from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s by Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik, Altaf Raja, and Pankaj Udhas, have found a new audience with younger generations. Although it's important to note that our gaze towards it is still an outsider's; and often ironic. Our affection for this music/era comes from a place of humour and meme culture. It'd be even fair to say that it doesn't truly belong to us.

But for the OGs; the working class men, the barbershop is often the only place that allows for a subtle disarmament. Public expressions of vulnerability, especially for them, are often circumscribed by expectations of stoicism. And so the barbershop becomes a rare enclave where they can, hide from the eyes of patriarchal notions of masculinity, be the soft romantics that they really are, and even yearn for the one that got away.

The barbershop is a compact social unit and a node in the networks of identity, class, culture, and community. It is a part of the social, emotional and cultural infrastructure of the common man that is often overlooked in the pulse of urban imagery. Shot through a bare-bones, almost documentarian gaze, without being aestheticised and romanticized, 'Cuts & Casettes' takes us into this world, one that is still insulated from the gloss and performativity of social media. It's a shared, solidaric pocket of care before one returns to the churn of daily life.

Follow Ranjit here.

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