From the days of Malgudi-- Kasturi akka, Panduranga Pandit and Sir Frederic Lawley

Almost 25 years after Malgudi Days-- an all time favorite and classic Indian television series based on the works of legendary writer RK Narayan was shot-- Photographer Aniruddha Chowdhury revisits Agumbe, a quaint village in Karnataka, where most parts of the serial were shot.

Agumbe is a village located in the Shimoga district in the state of Karnataka. Lying in the Thirthahalli taluk and the Malnad region, Agumbe is among the places in India that get a lot of rain. It's also called "Cherapunji of the South".

Agumbe is where 85 year old Panduranga Pandit (In Pic above) runs his tea shop.

And  Kasturi akka (In pic above and below) lives at 'Dodda Mane' (Big House) where large portions of the serial were shot.

You might remember R K Narayan's "Lawley Road." In that story, the municipal chairman wants to uproot the statue of Sir Frederick  Lawley without knowing who he was and later decides to install it again. "Narayan takes a dig at the unwise decision of whimsical authorities through the story." Well there you have (below) the broken statue of Sir Frederick.

To contact Aniruddha, mail him at rishi.chowdhury@gmail.com

 

 (In Pic:  Aniruddha)

Aniruddha Chowdhury is a photographer with Mint. Earlier he was with The New Indian Express. While working as a copywriter at an ad agency in Kolkata around 2006, he got hooked on to the instant gratification and the immeasurable power of single images. The initial experiments were carried out with a small digicam and a Vivitar SLR borrowed from a friend . He quit his job and trained under Indraneel Mukherjee, a well known fashion photographer in Kolkata. But soon he realised that the studio wasn't what had drawn him to a camera in the first place, rather it was the joy of preserving a slice of time and space of the world without altering what was really happening. He subsequently started accompanying a childhood friend, Bhaskar Mallick who worked as a staff photographer for The Statesman in Kolkata. He contributed several pictures to them and subsequently did a diploma in photojournalism from Ooty in 2008 and joined the The New Indian Express in Bangalore. He is greatly influenced by the works of Sebastian Salgado, Henri Cartier Bresson and Steve McCurry among many others. He also believes that a picture which preserves important moments of our history, doesn't have to be necessarily stripped of aesthetic qualities.