We Animals: Shatabdi Chakrabarti
A trader in a wholesale fish market weighs freshly harvested fish that have been taken out of the water a few hours earlier and transported in ice filled crates by road. Some of the individuals were still gasping to breathe while they were being placed on the scales and then put in large plastic bags to be taken to and sold at the local market. Image: S Chakrabarti.
Amongst those speaking for animals, documentary photographers play invaluable roles: putting themselves in the places where animals arguably suffer the most, in order to record all-too-often hidden truths and reveal them to the world. Without these extraordinary activists, far fewer would know about the travesties routinely meted out to animals, both wild and farmed, or witness the individuals trapped within systems.
One of the leading agencies in this field is We Animals, founded by Jo-Anne McArthur. In 2022, We Animals published Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene. “The photojournalists featured in HIDDEN have entered some of the darkest, most unsettling places in the world,” wrote actor and advocate Joaquin Phoenix in its foreword. “The images they have captured are a searing reminder of our unpardonable behavior towards animals and will serve as beacons of change for years to come.”
In a new series, The Empathy Project celebrates the work of We Animals by asking some of its photographers to talk about their favourite images. We start with New Delhi-based Shatabdi Chakrabarti.
Shatabdi Chakrabarti came to photography via her love of the natural world, initially in India’s forests and then increasingly in its urban and industrial hubs. Here, tigers and elephants, monkeys and dogs live cheek-by-jowl alongside humans. Degrees of conflict ensue, leading to questions: can humans and animals ever live in harmony - and what conditions hold conflict in place? Inevitably, the answers are profoundly complex.
In her images, Chakrabarti shows societies in which the growing need to sustain livelihoods often work at the expense of the natural world, threatening both humans and animals. Deep-rooted cultural practices come into play. “India has a history of co-habitation with wildlife,” says Chakrabarti. “All the gods and goddesses have an animal associated with them. Elephants and monkeys are seen as versions of Gods. In indigenous communities, even in areas where there is human-tiger conflict, the tiger is worshipped as a protector.”
But while there is reverence towards a particular species - or its representations - it rarely extends to individual animals. “A village may worship a statue of a tiger but kill the leopard who ventures into their fields. Similarly, a priest may tell someone, ‘feed a cow and a problem in your life will get sorted.’ But this person will not leave a bowl of water for a stray dog outside their home during the summer …”
Many of the animals Chakrabarti captures on film are those who have been trapped and traded - as pets, as food, as parts in traditional medicine. But where once such activities were practised at scales and in landscapes where native populations were able to repopulate, today, India’s people and its wildlife struggle against a perfect storm of human-led activities. These include deforestation for palm oil and soybeans, hunting and the infamous wildlife trades - and the exponential growth for all of them.
India’s once rich biodiverse systems are collapsing. Tiger and elephant populations have plummeted while the number of vultures has dropped by a staggering 97% since the 1990s due to poisoning, pesticides, and livestock medications. And it’s not just charismatic megafauna. Chakrabarti cites the sand boa, a non-venomous snake, whose blunt rounded tail has earned it the nickname ‘do muha’ or “‘two-headed snake’. Local beliefs claim it can bring prosperity or cast spells. Despite being listed as ‘Near Threatened’ on the IUCN Red List, and afforded ‘the same protection as tigers’, it is one of the most trafficked species in the world.
The same desire for ‘product’ - where that ‘product’ is an animal - drives the destruction most closely associated with industrial animal agriculture. India is the world’s third largest fish producing country in the world; in aquaculture, it is second only to China. Both industries has wreaked havoc on the country’s ecology and on its poorest people. Overfishing has disrupted marine ecosystems and emptied seas, leaving small fishing villages struggling to survive and forcing them to abandon strategies that have worked to keep the seas in balance. “In the past, artisanal fishing communities along coastlines would restrict fishing at particular times of the year - when the fish were breeding, for example,” offers Chakrabarti. “Now, a lot of these practices are ignored because of demand.”
Similar narratives abound in aquaculture. “I’ve met paddy farmers who are now aqua farmers,” says Chakrabarti. “They know that the water and soil quality have degraded but they can’t go back. Aqua farming is more profitable and encouraged by government schemes. But mangroves are being destroyed for aqua farms …”
The problem, says Chakrabarti, is demand, insatiable and growing, both from international markets and India’s affluent urbanites. “We’ve crossed 1.5 [degrees of global warming],” she says, bluntly. “We are losing sight of the bigger picture for short term profit. I love my country and its people and its biodiversity but there is so much to address. We’ve seen ecosystems collapse; we’re going down that same route. And it’s communities who have lived alongside Nature who are being impacted the most. When the cyclones hit across the coast, the fishing villages get destroyed.”
This is the lens, then, that Chakrabarti applies to her work - the impact of unchecked consumerism on society’s most vulnerable members and the animals who live among them. “You cannot negate the livelihoods of these people. The government doesn’t provide training for them to make a shift to something else. So I don’t show local people as the problem.”
The work requires resilience. “When I have a camera in my hand, it becomes a shield. I enter these spaces as a witness and I will try to capture what I’m witnessing. You know what is happening in front of you is horrible but you are here to do a job. Visuals are a change making tool - for anything. No one is going to read a 20 page document on the impact of aquafarms but they can take in an image of the pain and the suffering caused by aquafarms.”
“Every living thing on this planet from a tree to a tiger, they have a survival instinct, a will to live,” she says. “In a meat market, they know what is going to happen. They can feel the fear, the smell of their counterparts and they will struggle to the last minute. In that moment, it becomes important for me to document what’s going on. The feelings come later, after the assignment. Often, when I get back to the hotel room, I can’t get rid of the smell. But when I'm in that space, I can’t afford to become emotional because I’m there for a reason and that reason is to document what people don’t see, what’s on your plate and who it was before.”
See more of Shatabdi Chakrabarti’s work on her instagram page here.
Image: S Chakrabarti.
“Lion-tailed macaques are an endangered species, only found in Western Ghats of India. They’re arboreal which means they spend their life in the trees eating jackrfuits from the rainforest. But parts of these ancient forests have been cut down for tea and coffee plantations and linear infrastructure. So now, in some pockets of the landscape, these monkeys feed on garbage, rotting food - which is not what they’re supposed to be eating. And they’re coming across metal, plastic, artificial materials that aren’t supposed to be there at all. This is something we have done, without thinking about it, to a local ecosystem.”
Image: S Chakrabarti.
“I was doing a story on an old, self proclaimed monk in the state of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India, who collects stale bread, roti and biscuits from hotels and restaurants and feeds a horde of rhesus macaques near a temple. The monkeys have got used to him and they just climbed on top of him. There’s no hostility. He’s very comfortable with these monkeys but in my head, it was like the Planet of the Apes - both species fighting for survival. In India, monkeys and apes are seen as a version of the popular monkey god Lord Hanuman. People feed them for luck. Because of this, in parts of the country, these monkeys are now seen as pests. They raid houses and fridges; they bite and carry rabies. But people still feed them.”
Image: S. Chakrabarti.
“This was taken in a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu. I had seen rays in natural history films, where it’s almost like they’re flying in the ocean waters. I never imagined that the first time I saw this species in real life, it would be like this: a beautiful animal, flopped on the floor. The fishmonger saw me taking pictures so she lifted it up, very innocently, and posed herself. I didn’t ask her.
I deliberately don’t show her face in the image because, for her, the ray is simply a commodity that she is selling. She’s not thinking about the other angles. But as an observer, that’s what struck me. Fom the fisherman to the fishmonger, there are so many levels of lack of awareness. This disconnect is so great that the animal becomes something to pose with. And I kept thinking about how beautiful this ray would have been, gliding in the ocean, in the dark blue waters, with the sun rays coming in. Afterwards, it was just lying on the dirty wet floor, dead, cold; no one even stopped once to look at it.”
Image: S. Chakrabarti.
“This image was taken in Visakhapatnam, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, on the east coast of southern India, at an early morning fish market. These are dogfish sharks, very popular in the coastal belts; local people consume them. When I'm in these places, I speak to the people - a worker in the farm, a cab driver, a seller in the markets. It’s easy to become biased but we also have to be objective. You are in the middle of death and you’re experiencing it over and over again.
And it’s a death that we as a species have created; the reason for all these deaths is our need to consume - in different forms. I keep asking myself: what is the need for this? To show that we’re more powerful than Nature? We’re not. If all humans died, Nature will trhive but without Nature, we will die. Life will find a way. It makes me really humble that I’m a part of something so much bigger. As a species, we have placed ourselves on top of the food chain but we’re not bigger than Nature - and Nature is Life itself.”
