The Portraits of the Rabari Tribe: The Art of Less

 IN THE AGE OF spectacle, Rohit Chawla is practising the art of elimination. His new exhibition Wanderlust is a lesson in restraint—a refusal of ornamentation in a world that has forgotten how to look without decoration. Shot across the salt plains and deserts of Kutch, the series revisits the Rabari, Gujarat’s ancient nomadic tribe, not as study subjects but as individuals of resilience. In his photographs, Chawla does not feature sweeping dunes, golden sunsets or cinematic devices to romanticise their wander­ing lives. Instead, each frame offers quite the opposite: an encounter between the sub­ject and the lens, the stillness of a human face rendered in the barest possible terms.

Chawla, one of India’s top photographers and a former adman, frames the line where beauty meets truth. “I have always believed that less reveals more,” he says. “That in the absence of spec­tacle, something truer might surface.” For a photographer who has spent decades amid the “theatre of fashion” and advertising, this belief reads like both an aesthetic conviction and act of rebel­lion. Wanderlust, which was running at Main Art Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi, till October 29, 2025, marks a decisive turn away from the constructed glamour of studio imagery—away from stylists, retouchers, and curated perfection—towards a stark but luminous minimalism.

“I found it strange, almost theatrical, how portraits were manufactured,” he says “There was always a cast: stylists, makeup teams, digital retouchers on standby to coax a dimple, soften a shad­ow, erase a history. And in the middle of it all, the subject—performing not for the camera, but for their own myth.”

The Rabari portraits are the opposite of everything Chawla once did. In one photograph, a man stands tall, his face marked by sun and time, his white turban folded neatly against a plain background. There are no props, no scenic backdrops, no distractions. Only a patterned shirt that breaks the stillness. In another, a young girl looks straight at the camera from the corner of the frame, her face half in shadow, one earring catching the light. Her gaze is steady, unposed, almost disarming in its simplicity.

Chawla calls this the “punctum”, borrowing a word from philosopher Roland Barthes used for some unexplain­able detail that “pierces” the viewer. “Portraiture, to me, is not about likeness,” Chawla says. “It’s about the unscripted tremor that escapes the curated self. I’m not interested in captur­ing identities as they are presented, but in waiting for them to falter—just enough. For something human to show through.”

What he captures, then, isn’t a record of Rabari life but something unique— romanticised in its own way where documentation marries art.

Chawla, who began his career at JWT nearly 20 years ago and climbed the ladder to its creative head, later worked for India Today and Open in editorial capacity, photographing and docu­menting over 400 covers— all perfect examples of visual storytelling. He has also held several exhibitions, includ­ing The Quite Portrait, Banned Books and Untangling the Politics of the Hair as well as a book titled Rain Dogs.

Chawla is extremely proud of Rain Dogs which was to be exhibited at the Museum of Goa for about a month but lasted many months, making it the longest-held exhibition on canines.

To call Chawla’s work minimal­ist is not merely to describe its “visual economy”. Minimalism here is a philosophy, a way of resisting the noise that floods both art and media—the need for every image to announce itself. His photographs whisper instead of shout; their strength lies in silence. “My images are closer to absences than presences,” he says. “They lean toward [Richard] Avedon’s minimalism—not in style perhaps, but in spirit: the stripping away, the deliberate silences, the refusal to decorate.”

THIS REFUSAL FEELS radical in an age of excess. Too often, nomadic and tribal communi­ties are turned into spectacle—‘the desert wanderer’, ‘the mystic shepherd’. Chawla avoids these stereotypes and portrayals. His Rabaris stand simply as themselves—neither symbols of tradition nor props of art. He even avoids colour when it risks turning narrative into decoration.

But it’s not that Chawla outrightly rejects beauty. On the contrary, he ap­proaches it with precision. “Just clicking photos for political purposes is not enough,” he says. “It needs to be main­stream and aesthetically beautiful.” What he seeks is the space where art and documentation overlap, where romanti­cism and truth coexist. “He believes in the mix of art and documentation,” says one collaborator. “He believes in roman­ticising—but without lying.”

The power of Wanderlust lies in what it leaves unspoken. Each portrait sits somewhere between closeness and dis­tance. Chawla, who first photographed the Rabaris in 2005, gives himself only 10 minutes with each subject, working without assistants, artificial lights or props.

“Just the available light of the mo­ment and ten brief minutes to trespass, if I was lucky, into the subject’s inner life,” he says. Ten minutes is too short to invent a persona but then also long enough for to find something real. What emerges isn’t a perfect portrait but “something honest that slipped through before the mask recalibrated”.

The Rabaris, traditionally herd­ers and wanderers, embody a natural minimalism. Their name comes from rahabari meaning “outsiders” or those who live beyond settled paths. Their way of life mirrors the desert around them: sparse yet rich, simple yet full of endurance. “Rabari men dress simply, with fewer ornaments and a single garment,” Chawla notes. “In contrast, the women wear jewellery in defiance of the desert.” That contrast—the men’s restraint and the women’s boldness— runs through his frames.

By photographing them against plain backdrops, Chawla removes the obvious landscape without taking away the sense of place. The desert still lingers in the portraits through the wrinkles of the faces, the tilts of their shoulders, the dry humour of their gaze. “For the Rabari of Kutch their story is woven into the fabric of their landscape and their tradi­tional attire,” he writes in the exhibition catalogue, “The Rabari heart, like their mirror work and embroidery, captures the sun and refuses to break.”

Minimalism has a history in photog­raphy as one can see in Avedon’s In the American West: his white backdrops, his focus on ordinary people made grand. Chawla acknowledges the influence: But where Avedon’s portraits could feel severe, Chawla’s feel tender.

Historian William Dalrymple describes Wanderlust as “one of the most remarkable portfolios to come out of India since Cartier-Bresson was here with his Leica in the late 1940s”. Designer Tarun Tahiliani calls it a “powerful por­traiture that enhances the fierce dignity of an ancient tribe”. Artist Gaby Moore praises it as “a stunning and invaluable record of a fast-disappearing India”.

The acclaim isn’t only for the beauty of the images but for their self-discipline— their decision not to explain or dramatise. Each face carries its own silence, its own withheld story. In that sense, Wanderlust is less about the Rabari alone and more about what it means to be human: how we live behind our faces, our pauses, our small defences against being seen.

What lingers after the exhibition is not just the faces of the Rabari, but a lesson in attention. To look, truly look, is to listen— to wait for what reveals itself in the pauses between expression and performance. Wanderlust reminds us that minimalism is not about less meaning, but about more truth. In the pared-down language of his portraits, Chawla has found something enduring: the beauty of the unspoken, the trace that remains after everything unnecessary has been stripped away.