Sheba Chhachhi: When Private Suffering Became Public History

Sheba Chhachhi Sheba Chhachhi, is an Ethiopian-born Indian photographer, women's rights activist, writer, filmmaker, and installation artist. She is based in New Delhi and has exhibited her works widely in India and internationally. She returned to Delhi in 1980. India’s women’s movement was gathering force around issues that had long been treated as private family matters: dowry violence, domestic abuse, rape and the limited legal protection available to women. Chhachhi became both activist and photographer, documenting demonstrations, public testimonies, meetings and the women who were forcing those subjects out of the home and into public debate. 

Two photographs from those years lead into two very different histories of violence against women in India.

Is a dowry worth a life?

In 1986, at India Gate in Delhi, Chhachhi photographed Shahjahan Apa giving public testimony while holding a photograph of her eldest daughter, Noorjahan.

Noorjahan had been burned to death in 1979 in a dowry-related killing.

Dowry has a long history in South Asia. Traditionally it involved money, jewelry, goods or property transferred by the bride’s family in connection with marriage. Although India prohibited dowry through legislation in 1961, the practice continued, and in some marriages demands for additional money or goods continued long after the wedding.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, women’s organizations were drawing attention to a horrifying pattern: young married women dying from burns or other suspicious circumstances following harassment over dowry.

The deaths were frequently described as domestic accidents.

The women’s movement challenged that explanation.

Chhachhi has recalled that husbands and their families could use dowry as a way to demand increasingly more from a bride’s family, and that women were being killed when those demands were not met. 

The numbers were disturbing. Research on the movement notes that official statistics recorded 112 dowry deaths in Delhi between 1982 and 1984, while Delhi police’s anti-dowry cell reported hundreds of bride-burning deaths in a single year—illustrating both the scale of the problem and the difficulty of determining which deaths were accidents, suicides or killings. 

For Shahjahan Apa, none of this was theoretical.

Her daughter was dead.

She could have remained a grieving mother inside her own family. Instead, she carried Noorjahan’s photograph into demonstrations and public meetings and spent years campaigning against the violence that had killed her.

Her loss became testimony.

Together with another mother, Satyarani, whose daughter had also been killed in a dowry-related death, Shahjahan later helped establish Shakti Shalini, a shelter and legal-aid organization for women experiencing domestic and dowry violence.

That history changes the meaning of Chhachhi’s photograph.

We are not simply looking at a protester.

We are looking at a mother refusing to allow her daughter’s death to remain a private tragedy.

Women against communal violence

This photograph takes us into another chapter of Delhi’s history.

It is catalogued as Sikh widow, Trilokpuri, photographed in 1987 and later incorporated into Chhachhi’s Seven Lives and a Dream. 

Three years earlier, in October 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

In the days that followed, Sikhs were attacked across Delhi and elsewhere in India.

Trilokpuri, a working-class neighborhood in East Delhi, became one of the worst sites of the violence. Contemporary reporting and later investigations describe hundreds of Sikh residents killed there in a matter of days. Many men were beaten and burned alive; houses and businesses were destroyed. Sexual violence against Sikh women was also documented.

When the killing stopped, another history began.

Women were left without husbands, sons, brothers, homes and income.

About a year later, roughly 600 widows from affected areas including Trilokpuri were resettled in Tilak Vihar, an area that eventually became widely known as Delhi’s “Widows’ Colony.” 

News photographs tend to concentrate on the moment of violence: fire, crowds, bodies, destruction.

Chhachhi was interested in what followed.

The widow in Chhachhi’s archive represents a history that communal violence often leaves behind: women inheriting the consequences of violence they did not create.

Seven lives — not seven victims

Eventually, Chhachhi became uncomfortable with something about her own documentary photographs. She knew these women personally.

She knew their humor, contradictions, friendships, families, politics and ordinary lives. Yet photographs made during demonstrations inevitably showed them in moments of anger, grief and confrontation.

The women were much more complicated than their images as protesters.

And Chhachhi began questioning the power of the photographer herself.

Who decides what another person looks like to history?

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she invited seven women from the movement, including Shahjahan Apa, to collaborate with her on a new series of portraits.

This time, the women chose how they would be represented.

They selected locations, objects, clothing, poses and ways of looking at the camera. Chhachhi later said that the process allowed her to alter, at least partly, the balance of power between photographer and subject. She had become troubled by documentary photography’s tendency to reproduce the very hierarchy it claimed to expose: one person observes; another becomes the observed.

The resulting work became Seven Lives and a Dream.

It combines the earlier photographs of demonstrations with those later collaborative portraits. The same woman might appear shouting in the street in one image and sitting quietly inside her home in another.

That was deliberate.

Chhachhi did not want history to remember these women simply as victims of violence, or even simply as activists.

They had lives before the demonstrations.

They had lives afterward.

And perhaps that is the most important thing her archive preserves.

One woman turned the murder of her daughter into a campaign against dowry violence. Another belongs to a generation of women left behind by communal massacre. Sheba Chhachhi documented the point where private suffering entered public history.

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