#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Photographer Poulomi Basu said she got the idea after reading a newspaper article in 2009: India for the first time was recruiting women to serve in its Border Security Patrol, training them to police the country's long and dangerous boundary with its archenemy, Pakistan.
“I thought this was something important that needed to be documented,†said Ms. Basu, who was born in India and divides her time now between London and Mumbai.
The merit of the project magnified in her mind as she realized all that her photos might show. Most of the recruits were from impoverished rural areas. If she could observe them not only in training but with their families as well, she would be able to tell the story of their transformation from villagers into soldiers.
“For these women, putting on a uniform was like coming out of their own skin,†Ms. Basu said. “They saw it as a way of gaining some form of independence.â€
The Border Security Patrol is a paramilitary force, and while some women joined simply as a way to earn money, others enlisted so they could escape the constraints of patriarchal family life. In India, while women are venerated, they are also expected to remain “passive,†Ms. Basu said.
In fact, some of the recruits were simply replacing duty to family with duty for country. “They often think it's a massive privilege to serve for the nation with almost the same conviction in the way they would serve a man,†she said.
Ms. Basu believed her photos could evoke powerful themes: youth, gender, love, patriotism, the concept of home, the stress of new undertakings.
India already had a small number of women in its armed forces but these recruits were being asked to become sentinels in the hard and dangerous terrain between two nuclear-armed nations that have fought three all-out wars and several smaller ones.
Since 1947, when British relinquished its colonial hold on the Indian subcontinent and midwifed the synchronized birth of India and Pakistan, the two countries have disputed their imposed borders, most often in the province of Jammu and Kashmir. Both nations tend to believe the other is capable of heinous acts and frequently they are right. Pakistan has long dispatched fighters across the border while also financing Kashmiri insurrectionists; in response, India, according to human rights groups, has killed thousands in extra-judicial murders in its counterinsurgency campaign.
The first of the new female recruits were deployed in September 2009. But Ms. Basu's work had begun three months earlier when she began the difficult task of getting the required government permission.
“Access was a problem,†s he said. “I had to go through a series of people. For a while, it seemed like I was always on the phone, and it made a big difference when I was able to see people face to face. It made my life easier to be a woman and to be an Indian national.â€
This was a project Ms. Basu, a freelancer, was doing on her own but the authorities insisted she demonstrate some affiliation with a publication. Through a friend of a friend she was able to secure a letter from Rolling Stone, she said. That finally satisfied the Indian authorities. In 2009, Ms. Basu made three trips to the border areas where the women were training, each lasting three or four days; she made another trip last year.
Photos taken in the early part of the project - the initial training and visits to the women's villages - were shot in color. “This was a time of love and contentment and it was very vivid,†Ms. Basu said.
But then when the women actually began to patrol, she switched to black-and -white. “The border life is really rubbish,†she said. “It's very desolate there and you sit in the camps and nothing happens. Because their lives lacked color, I wanted to have a grainier, intense look.â€
One of the most riveting photographs shows a dead man hanging upside down (Slide 14), his legs caught in the high barbed wire fence that India has constructed to demarcate the border. Guards had shot the man as he and others tried to enter Pakistan near Attari, in Punjab State, Ms. Basu said.
She was taken to the spot by the media chaperones of the border patrol. “'Madam, here, see the blood,'†Ms. Basu recalled them saying.
These minders were unsure what she could be allowed to photograph. In the end, however, they not only allowed her to take pictures, they supplied the equipment. Her Nikon F80 had stopped working earlier in the day, she said, and the minders loaned her a Canon point-and-shoot.
“They were actually proud that they had killed these guys, but they were worried about the accusations of human rights violations,†Ms. Basu said. “They told me, ‘This is not what people ever get to see.'â€
