Signed copy First Edition (2025) Hardcover ISBN 978-81-966502-4-7 Edition of 600 Presented by The Alkazi Foundation of the Arts Supported by Tata Trust
Sparseeing unfolds from a wooden box once belonging to one of the last remaining Parsis of Jamshedpur: a box filled with glass cinema slides, postcards from ships, studio portraits, and a red diary kept by Mr. Keki Gazdar, a mechanical engineer at Tata Steel. Part family album, part industrial memory, and part act of imagination, the book reconstructs a life through what remains of an archive.
Gazdar’s photographs trace a journey between home and elsewhere, between the steel township of Jamshedpur and the ship decks and harbours of postwar Europe. Through these images, he becomes both chronicler and dreamer: recording his city’s making while quietly searching for his own visual language.
Rather than presenting history as fixed, Sparseeing asks the reader to look through fragments, to fill in the blanks, to see sparsely. Each page moves between document and fiction, between fact and the act of remembering. In doing so, the book becomes both an inquiry into how archives survive, and a meditation on what it means to keep seeing even as the world you know begins to disappear.
