Repost from @ashish
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Mumbai based photographer Ketaki Sheth, spent several years visiting Sidi villages across small areas of western India, taking portraits of their daily life. The Sidi ( or Siddi , Sidhi) are a close knit Indian community of African descent who migrated to India in successive waves between the 9th and 16th centuries. Their languages, cuisine and clothes are Indian but they have maintained a connection with their African roots via music , dance and spirituality. These photos were taken between 2009-2013. “In Diu, I would discover a commonality in the Gujarati spoken by the Wahindi, East Africans of Indian descent, and the Sidi, Indians of African descent: on both sides of the ocean, our spoken Gujarati was sprinkled with Kiswahili words. I had discovered during earlier visits to India that words that I had grown up thinking of as Gujarati—sokoni [kitchen], pasi [iron], funiko [lid], fagiyo [broom]—were actually Kiswahili words. Now, I marvelled as I talked to Naginaben Adam of Diu, an elderly grandmother in her 90s, her speech punctuated with Kiswahili words: mashamba [farm], mzee [an elder], hodi [a greeting], karibu [welcome] jambo sana [very well]. In the days that followed, my list of Kiswahili words in the spoken Gujarati of African immigrants from the Mozambican coast kept on growing.” - excerpt from a wonderful essay THE SIDI by Mahmood Mamdani which is available to read online if you want to read up more about this 🖤. #sidi #siddi #africa #india #history #commonalities #community #ketakisheth