Abhishek Khedekar

Tamasha is a docu-fiction photographic project that explores the everyday realities of Lokkalawant, a one-hundred-member family of performers, which lives nomadically across Maharashtra, India. The research of Abhishek Rajaram Khedekar moves beyond the spectacle of Tamasha to examine the systemic discrimination and social neglect faced by its practitioners, who are often reduced to mere entertainers.

The project developed through sustained engagement, with Khedekar spending six months in 2016 living and traveling with the community, gradually building trust and intimacy. The resulting work combines documentary observation with constructed and fictive elements to reflect on normalized hierarchies and prejudice embedded in society. Expanding the notion of performance, Tamasha becomes both subject and method—using visual language to articulate questions of marginality, representation, and belonging.