Shreya Rana Captures The Connection Between Dhobi Ghat & Mumbai's Red Light District

Mumbai’s Dhobi Ghat and Kamathipura have always lived in proximity, but their real connection has rarely been acknowledged. For decades, the women of Kamathipura and Falkland Road — tawaifs, dancers, and working women — sent their velvet blouses, chiffon saris, and sequinned costumes to the dhobis. The laundries of Dhobi Ghat became an extension of the red-light district’s backstage: rinsing away the night so the women could step back into it again. As sex work moves online and both neighbourhoods face redevelopment, that relationship has thinned to memory. The garments no longer arrive in the same volume, and the craft of hand-washing itself stands on the cusp of disappearing entirely.

It is this fading ecosystem that photographer and filmmaker Shreya Rana revisits in her new photoseries. She frames Dhobi Ghat as a site where the city’s unspoken histories still cling to lines of drying cloth. The images float — somewhere between documentary and dream. We see garments suspended in mid-air, wash pens glistening under harsh sun, and colours drifting like fragments of old stories. The series positions the Ghat as a memory machine, a place that once washed what another part of the city lived.

Shreya stumbled upon the Kamathipura connection during a photowalk with her team. Sitting with a fifth-generation dhobi, she listened as he recounted a time when the largest and most consistent orders came from 'Kamathi.' Hesitant at first, then with an exhausted pride, he spoke about bedsheets, chiffons, silks, cheap lipstick stains and sequins that arrived in bulk every week. What linked the two spaces, the photographer realised, was labour that remained unseen — women working through the night, and dhobis resetting their stories by dawn. The insight didn’t come from archives but from hands that had scrubbed that history.

Shreya's own artistic path explains her sensitivity to such spaces. Born in Shimla, she describes herself as someone who absorbs impact and turns it into movement — a temperament shaped not through formal photography training but through detours in medicine and neuropsychology before she 'fell' into visual work. Her practice now spans across photography, filmmaking, sketching, and painting, held together by curiosity.

Her influences are scattered, from Abramović’s endurance, Hopper’s solitude, Sher-Gil’s intimacy, Wong Kar-wai’s drift. What binds them is an attention to the tender and the absurd; the soft edge inside harsh environments. This Dhobi Ghat series follows that instinct. Having swallowed the city’s stories for a century, it's still working and alive.

Follow Shreya here.

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