This work explores migration, memory and belonging through family history and a fragmented relationship with place. Returning to Allahabad after years away, Raghav Goswamy traces what remains of inherited journeys through photographs, objects, silences and the shifting landscapes of childhood.

The project emerges from questions of migration, memory and belonging shaped by family history and the artist’s own changing relationship with his place of birth.

His paternal grandfather migrated from Sargodha, now in Pakistan, to Allahabad as a thirteen-year-old boy during the freedom movement in undivided India, never able to return. His mother’s family relocated to Calcutta in 1947 after Partition. What remains of these journeys are stories, gaps and silences.

Goswamy was born in Allahabad and spent his early childhood there before leaving for boarding school, returning only intermittently over the years. Each return revealed a different version of the same city. In 2020, during lockdown, he came back for an extended period after nearly fifteen years away. Confined to the family home, he encountered old photographs and objects that felt like artefacts of half-remembered lives.

As restrictions eased, he began revisiting riversides, playgrounds, homes and forgotten corners from childhood. Through this process, the work attempts to bring personal memory and inherited history into relation, tracing what survives, what has shifted and what has been irretrievably lost.

Artist Bio

Raghav Goswamy is a photographer from India, now based in Mumbai. He studied Communication Design at Pearl Academy in New Delhi after completing his schooling in Allahabad and Ajmer.

His work explores nostalgia, memory, space and reflection. His ongoing projects include ‘Thinking of a Place’, in which he documents his shifting relationship with family and his birthplace, and ‘Winter at the Garden’, which develops through repeated visits to his wife’s family home in north-east India.