Komal Chamling
Komal Chamling is an aspiring photographer from Namchi, Sikkim. She has previously worked in the education sector as Director of EQUIP, a program building leadership of teachers and principals across 120 government schools of Sikkim. She is also the Founder of Artem – a magazine chronicling the art sector of northeast India. Since May 2019, she has become an active participant of a political party in Sikkim and is currently leading its social media division.
Loss, and then Comes Healing
The photographs in this series capture moments from my grandfather’s one year death anniversary that we observed together as a family in Chyadara, Sikkim. Since the photographs are deeply personal and capture an intimate time for my family, I was faced with a lot of difficulty writing about them.. There is a lot of emotion attached to the photographs and so I leave them to speak for themselves. I would only like to point out the gender roles that I believe emerge from the photographs, with the male members of my family solely presiding over rituals. This is the norm in my Kirati Rai culture and is something that has always bothered me that in all rituals—whether birth, marriage, death—it is the male members that participate in such cultural transactions, while women play a supportive but peripheral role.