Drawn to the layered worlds of Calcutta — from the cinematic realism of Satyajit Ray to the wry visual narratives of Sarnath Banerjee — I became fascinated by the enduring figure of the Bengali babu, or more affectionately, Babumoshai. Born of colonial modernity, both celebrated and satirized, the babu embodied a generation caught between English education and Bengali sensibility, intellect and inertia.

I wandered through Kolkata’s historic Esplanade district in search of these almost-fictional figures — men who seemed to have stepped out of another time, in pleated trousers and sweater vests, their hair neatly parted, leather briefcases in hand. I photographed them in a typological yet fluid style — portraits grounded in the immediacy of the street, rich with Calcutta’s dense textures and humid light.

Through this project, I seek to document the babu not as a nostalgic relic but as a living remnant of postcolonial modernity and the bureaucratic state. In doing so, I explore how history lingers in gesture, in fabric, in the way a man carries himself through a city that has already outgrown him — and how identity, class and masculinity are performed, remembered and reimagined in everyday life.