Travel to India Themes: Juxtapositions

These pictures catch some tiny degree of the collision between the traditional and the modern in India.

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Old and new in central Chennai (Madras).

The expansion of Indian cities has been dramatic, not only in its scale but in its newly organized geometry, in this case at Hyderabad.

New technology meets old custom, as in this a wedding procession lit by a portable generator that powers a music system, too. Etawah, between Agra and Kanpur.

The Chennai (Madras) bookfair, with scores of participating publishers.

This language or that at Mathura, near Agra.

And always the ultimate contrast, between rich and poor. Middle-class housing in the background, with a puptent in the foreground belonging to a family of semi-nomadic Banjara, typically engaged in hard labor.

Mother and daughter at home in the streets close to Osmania University in Hyderabad. The stencilled sign raises questions about how the importance of traditional crafts, so attractive to a distant, comfortable class of people, to the Indian poor, dependent on cast-off manufactured stuff.