Meet the man who photographed India’s street style before it became an Instagram craze

In 2009, when few in India were thinking about street style, Manou had the first mover’s advantage. He also had the burden of the pioneer – there was no template around him to follow. He began charting his course anyway, cataloguing people and clothes on his blog like moths on a pin board.

Seven years on, his work has been featured in the New Yorker, the V&A museum in London, the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Vogue UK and many other publications, but to most people, he is still just Manou.

Manou’s life’s treasures fit in one suitcase. He has been travelling from place to place for the past three years, discovering a watering hole in Puducherry and spending the whole day there, and leaving for Dharamshala, when he craves the hills.

“I met a sadhu who told me that he just left everything, his family, his shop, his home and just started walking, and never went back,” Manou recalled. “He met some other sadhus, hung around at temples but he didn’t feel any loss. I don’t remember if I asked him or he told me himself – that there is a god, and the people who realise it, realise that there is nothing to do but live in whichever way you want to live. I thought I identified with him...but the feeling passed.”

Auroville, Nagaland, Aizwal, Rajasthan, Dharamsala: he doesn’t belong to one place. Speaking from Dharamshala, the place where it all began for him, Manou recalls the trip taken on a whim years ago, which led to the blog that became so popular in the world of Indian street style. “I don’t go with a plan, I just reach and figure out,” he said, describing his easy, whimsy approach to fashion photography and life.

This is also why he is stuck in a traffic jam, and realising that the cafe he was supposed to be heading to (“Cafe Common Ground, have you been there?”) will be shut, because it’s Sunday: a small price to pay for spontaneity. “But there are mountains all around me,” he said. “I am sitting at a chai shop, waiting for the jam to pass.”

Manou’s photographs follow a template: portrait style, same size, same distance. It seems a deliberate device to not focus on stylising the image much, so that the viewer’s gaze is focused purely on the subject. The photographer is not present – and the signature absence makes his presence loom.

Examining street style in India is like looking at the superstructure – it will always recreate the base of economic inequalities. Manou uses this juxtaposition deftly. While most street style photographers focus on fashion weeks and urban life, Manou’s oeuvre is a mix of urban, rural, niche – all laid out next to each other, poetic in their similarities.

“Earlier I wouldn’t ask everyone to stop for my images,” he said. “But then I realised if I want to respect everyone in the same way I should ask and photograph everyone in the same manner – that led to a uniformity.”

“I have been to Pushkar for the camel fair three or four times,” he added. “Twice I went a few days before the fair began and stayed through the festival. It gets crazy and then it gets quiet. Now the locals know that people come here to take pictures sell the pictures for money, because the same people can be seen on postcards. So now, they ask for a lot of money to take their pictures.” Much like Vegas and Times Square.

“It’s okay to pay but some people are just standing on the streets deliberately because they know they’ll be photographed,” Manou said.

There’s a certain cocoon, hygge-like quality (what the Danish value as cosiness) in most of his work. He laughs at the suggestion: “That’s because I am always shooting in cold places – Dimapur, Kohima, Dharamsala, Aizwal.”

When taking photographs, Manou prefers the vantage point of a place where spending time on the street is most comfortable. Where he stands is not an artistic choice – it is nothing grandiose, just logistics.

People have called Manou everything – from “the Sartorialist of India” to comparing him with Bill Cunningham. He deadpans, “People also compare based on how much they know,” and adds with a laugh, “I like Bill Cunningham though. I found out about all these people after I started taking pictures. Someone in Dharamsala showed me photocopies of Fruits magazine and I thought something like that could be done in India.”

Fruits is a street style magazine based in Japan, led by photographer Shoichi Aoki, a big favourite of Manou’s. After a healthy 20-year-run, the magazine shut shop in 2017 because, as Aoki said, “There were no more fashionable kids to photograph.” But there will be fashion. As clothes become “an extension of people”, chronicling clothes will perhaps one day, be akin to chronicling life.