IN THE OPENING sequence to his photo book 1528, Rohit Saha is quick to set the tone for the narrative that follows. It opens with a grainy black-and-white image of a man’s face, framed such that it cuts right under his eyes, his unflinching gaze directed at the viewer. This injects the work with a confrontational tone that resurfaces time and again over the course of the book.

The photograph on the following page shows a piece of cloth strewn on the ground, a chair in the middle of the frame and a single window on the far right. Two bars on the window ominously block the view to the outside. The scene is reminiscent of depictions—in cinema and other forms of visual culture—of interrogations in prison cells. Despite the absence of people in the photograph, it conjures up images of hostile questioning by authorities. Often in these scenes, such interrogations are followed by torture, possibly alluded to here by the piece of cloth on the ground.

Saha’s book, which has been in the making since 2016, was launched alongside an ongoing exhibition at Art Heritage, a gallery in Delhi, on 30 August 2019. When he was researching for his degree project at the National Institute of Design, he came across headlines about Irom Sharmila breaking a 16-year-long hunger strike by tasting honey. Force-fed during this period through a nasal tube, she had undertaken the strike in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or AFSPA, in Manipur. In 2016, she decided to end the fast and join politics.