Rampur is a small city four hours north of Delhi that many Indians have never heard of. A well-constructed highway loops around the city, which means travelers on their way to more popular destinations need not stop. And why would they?
The city has the highest Muslim population in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and poorest state. According to the 2011 census, just half Rampur’s 2.3 million residents could read. The Times of India has called it India’s “filthiest city.”
So begins Tira Khan’s description of her photo exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum, and her journey of self-discovery from her home in Newton to her ancestral home in Rampur. Tira grew up in Newton Lower Falls, where she lived with her parents and her two younger brothers. She attended Newton public schools and graduated from Newton North High School. Tira’s father, the late Nasir Khan, was born and raised in London, where he studied medicine, and came to Boston to complete his psychiatric training. He married her mother, State Representative Kay Khan, and became the CEO of Bournewood, a psychiatric hospital.
After graduating from college, Tira married Daniel Winston. She was a reporter for The Lowell Sun, among other newspapers, and had three daughters. Although she “was always a visual person,” it was the advent of motherhood that led her to the camera and acclaim as a photographer. Among her notable works are her 2018 photographs of West Newton’s historic Allen House, part of its permanent collection.
As children, she and her brothers visited their father’s relatives in London many times and were close with their father’s cousins in Canada. But they knew little about the family’s previous life in Rampur. Her grandfather, who had been the personal physician to Rampur’s ruler, Nawab Raza Ali Khan, traveled to London to further his medical training. He and his family settled in London in the 1930s.
Tira’s father organized a family trip to India for the first time in 2013, touring iconic sites like the Taj Mahal and visiting their ancestral home in Rampur. Before that trip, Tira said, her father and his family seemed somewhat reluctant to discuss their past. The more she discovered, the more curious she became about her heritage and history. Celebrating their visit to Rampur, her father’s brother — the only one of his family still living in Rampur — organized an elaborate welcome party at the family home. It was their first and last family trip to India. Nasir Khan died in 2014.
For Tira, that trip to India piqued her interest and her desire to return to the Rampur. To prepare for another visit, she spent hours thinking about how to photograph the city, as well as researching its history online and at the British Library in London. In 2019, she travelled to India twice, first with her cousin and later by herself. Tira explained that Rampur is not a tourist attraction. “For a visitor, it is charming and frustrating at the same time,” she says, describing the poverty, the unpredictable electricity, crumbling infrastructure, architecture, and culture. She said it feels like being back in another time. Although it has a reputation as “a tough city,” she says the people are friendly. Most are Muslims of Pathan ancestry who speak Urdu — which her father spoke exclusively until he started school in London. The economy centers on small shops selling textiles and bead work. Residents travel around the city in rickshaws.
Images from the series, A Place I Never Knew, are on display at the Boston Athenaeum until February 20. She will be discussing the series on Thursday, February 2 with Laura Weinstein, the Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts. Of her father’s family, Tira says, most have moved away but enjoy visiting the city. Tira wants to return to Rampur to capture more of the street scenes and daily life.
