Photo Project: Dragging as Mandakini at Gudimalkapur Flower Market by Manab Das

This project began at dawn, in the quiet tension between the private and the public. Inside a sleeping home, drag was first assembled as an intimate ritual — layers of primer, paint, fabric, and courage built slowly while the world remained unaware. But the intention was never to keep it contained. The goal was to carry this constructed self into a space that was ordinary, crowded, and unmistakably real.

Set in Hyderabad — a city where visibility for queer people can still invite scrutiny or danger — the photoshoot sought to test what happens when fantasy steps into everyday life. The chosen location, Gudimalkapur Flower Market, was not neutral ground. It is a place of commerce, ritual supply, labour, and tradition, operating at daybreak and largely untouched by performative spectacle. By placing an opulent, historically layered drag persona within this environment, the project created a deliberate collision between excess and routine, queerness and convention, anonymity and attention.

The visual language drew from multiple timelines at once — Victorian silhouettes, Indian textiles, theatrical costuming, and dense floral symbolism. Flowers functioned not merely as decoration but as historical carriers of coded desire, mourning, celebration, and secrecy. In a market where blooms are sold for weddings, funerals, and religious offerings, they also became a vocabulary for queer existence: fragile yet persistent, ornamental yet deeply political.

Equally central to the project was negotiation. Permission had to be asked, identities explained, boundaries respected. What began as a potentially confrontational intrusion gradually transformed into a collaborative presence, revealing how curiosity can sometimes soften into acceptance when met with openness. The camera did not document a performance staged for an audience; it captured a temporary reordering of a public space, where workers, shoppers, and passersby became witnesses to an unexpected narrative.

Ultimately, the project functions as both portrait and intervention. It asks what it means to occupy space visibly when that visibility is not guaranteed safety, and how performance can momentarily suspend the rules that govern who is allowed to be seen. By placing a deliberately constructed body amid the textures of everyday life, the work argues that queer expression is not separate from the world but already threaded through it — waiting,

like seeds, for the right conditions to bloom.

At the heart of this project was not simply a subject and a photographer, but a process of co-creation between performer and image-maker. From its earliest conception, Manab Das and I approached the shoot as a shared artistic experiment rather than a commissioned portrait session. The drag persona, the location, the risks, and even the narrative arc of the images were shaped through ongoing dialogue. We were not documenting a pre-existing character; we were building one together in response to space, light, and circumstance.

Manab’s role extended far beyond operating the camera. He functioned as witness, collaborator, strategist, and at times co-conspirator. Entering a public market in full drag required constant recalibration — where to stand, how to move, when to blend in, and when to lean into spectacle. His sensitivity to the environment allowed the photographs to capture authenticity rather than voyeurism. He framed moments that emphasized tension without sensationalizing it: the curious glances, the stillness amid chaos, the surreal juxtaposition of couture against crates of marigolds.

My performance, in turn, responded to his gaze. Drag is inherently relational; it comes alive through being seen. As Manab adjusted angles, distances, and compositions, I adjusted posture, gesture, and energy. Sometimes I became monumental and theatrical, occupying space with regal confidence; at other times I softened into vulnerability, allowing the costume to appear almost fragile within the industrial setting. The images emerged from this back-and-forth — a visual conversation rather than a one-sided capture.

Trust was the invisible architecture of the collaboration. In a setting where visibility could attract hostility, I relied on Manab not only to create compelling images but also to help maintain situational awareness. He, in turn, trusted me to navigate interactions with locals, explain the project, and secure consent. This mutual reliance transformed the act of photographing into a shared act of care.

The result is a body of work that belongs equally to both of us. The photographs are neither purely documentary nor purely staged; they are traces of a temporary alliance between performance and perception. Through our co-creation, the market became a stage without being turned into one, and the drag persona became both character and collaborator — shaped as much by Manab’s framing as by my embodiment.

In this sense, the project demonstrates that queer visibility is rarely a solo act. It is sustained by networks of support, by people willing to stand beside, behind, and sometimes slightly out of frame. What the camera ultimately records is not only a figure in elaborate costume, but the quiet partnership that made it possible for that figure to exist in that space at all.