Shashwat Das (b.1998) is a lens-based artist from India whose work navigates movement, memory, and the traces of human-induced decay embedded in landscapes of resistance. His practice lies at the intersection of documentary, fine art, and ethnographic inquiry. He is an alumnus of the Pathshala Resting Academy international residency.

I was brought up in a Probashi (outsider) Bengali household in Delhi, where travel, impermanence and movement had been lived through my previous generations. I grew up listening to stories of my grandparents’ forced migration from former East Pakistan during endless road trips across India with my parents. I always had a sketchbook with me, my earliest memories of capturing an image I wanted to preserve was a drawing of a red helicopter crossing snow capped mountains in Kedarnath. My sketches turned into images when I got my first point-and-shoot camera from my father at the age of four. I began to photograph landscapes to create an understanding of the fast pace at which I was constantly moving and seeing change. Today, movement continues to define my work. 

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My current body of work, ‘Jungle Mahal’, is my visual inquiry into the layered landscapes of Purulia, where histories of extraction meet living memory. Once exploited under British rule through mining and timber, and later reshaped by hydroelectric projects, the region carries a colonial hangover despite its legacy of resistance. Working here, I developed my own contact printing method ‘Ferro-Botanical prints’ , using iron and Palash flowers to embody both destruction and pride. Through Chhau, a martial art dance born of defiance, I encounter survival as performance. My work seeks to unravel how human development in Purulia remains entangled with non-human forces shaping its fragile, resistant present. 

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My understanding of documentation and movement started with my previous project, ‘Sadak’, Sadak, where I witnessed Delhi’s pivotal protests, the CAA and the Farmers’ movement unfolding on the streets. Living among protestors for months, I instinctively documented a community confronting imminent loss, while reflecting on my own history of displacement. That experience grounded my exploration of movement, migration, and identity, and revealed how public space becomes a stage where democracy is contested. In Nepal, I extended this inquiry by photographing the gutted parliament after a Gen Z–led uprising. Pillars of Democracy (2025) looks at the Charred pillars and twisted steel as they became metaphors for both collapse and resilience, exposing the fragility of institutions and the tensile strength of people demanding change. Together, these works trace a cycle across South Asia corruption, uprising, and reformation where the street and the state continually collide. 

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Documenting the archive of Jungle Mahal where only oral history remains has led me to think about the land across the border where my grandparents migrated from. By moving onwards with Posto through At the Edge of Home, I see my work growing into a series of images that creates a future archive of my home back in Bangladesh, one I only know about through the car journeys as a child. I am keen to explore, what does it mean to build a visual archive when it exists solely in memory? Through my work, I attempt to recreate fragments of home from the faint memories passed down.

memories passed down.