THE VILLAGE
DOCTOR

At 92, my grandfather still spends seven days a week in a rural clinic he set up in 1951 after serving as a doctor in the Indian army.  His work and life were forever shaped by independence era ideals of secularism and internationalism. He trained his hospital staff, most of whom had not completed high school, in medicine and Marx. He was not alone in his thinking, but as decades passed, a fervent religiosity spread. India recently elected a far right Hindu nationalist as Prime Minister. Men and women like my grandfather became relics. These photographs are a portrait of a man and a place stuck in time. They capture his vague loneliness, surrounded by people, but in a country that has grown strange to him.