Spanning India, East Africa and the UK, Nalini explores the connected histories of Arpita Shah, her mother and her grandmother. Bringing contemporary portraits and still lifes together with family photographs and heirloom objects, the series traces the effects of migration, distance and loss across generations. Shah’s search through family archives and visits to places connected with her maternal ancestors led to new discoveries about their lives and relationships. The title is her grandmother’s name and the Sanskrit word for lotus. Flowers recur as offerings to the women in her family: the lotus symbolises femininity, fertility and rebirth, while bougainvillea connects memories of India and East Africa. Photographs of bodies, possessions and places bring these family histories together.


Arpita Shah has explained that "This is one of the first images that I found, it’s a crumbling photograph of the infamous Krishna Milk Depot that my family owned in Nairobi in the 1930s. In the centre of the image is 5-year-old Nalini, my grandmother.

Finding this photograph was very significant for me - my grandmother would talk endlessly about the turquoise hues of the Mombasa sea and the wild bougainvillea that surrounded the Krishna dairy farm. So being able to physically see it was wonderful and incredibly emotional. I think if I hadn’t started this project, this image would have decayed in the attic where I found it."


Emilia Terracciano’s Street Level Photoworks minigraph, Nalini: Memory of Things, relates the dairy photograph to the family’s commercial life in Nairobi. She describes the staff and vehicles around the depot and recounts gifts of fruit and flowers brought to Shah’s great-grandmother in emptied milk cans. In this context, the recovered photograph preserves both a family memory and a record of the business around which their Kenyan life was organised.