The new india is much celebrated these days: the India of IT stars and moon-shots, Mumbai-based multinationals and nuclear power stations, Bollywood blockbusters and mass mobile-telephony. Yet the old India lingers, in ways both glorious and hideous. Pete Pattisson, a photographer who spent much of his childhood in the country, has returned to it frequently in the past couple of years. “You hear a lot about ‘shining India’ and all that,” he says, “but I have been struck by how feudal, how medieval it still is.”
MANUAL WORKER
Shyari, 60, binds her hands in cloth to protect them from the bricks she shifts for 12 hours a day.
