Ripples in the Pond is photographer Bharat Sikka’s latest project, set in Makharda, a township on the edge of Kolkata, West Bengal. Surrounded by more than 20 ponds, Makharda is a landscape where slow but steady urban encroachment is reshaping daily life. Sikka’s photographs capture these shifts, revealing how past and present collide in this semi-rural setting.

The work is also personal. Sikka calls Ripples in the Pond an act of return—both physical and emotional—drawing on memories of Malgudi Days, the 1980s television series about a sleepy small town, to shape a visual language for the semi-rural imagination. The ponds, which appear again and again throughout the project, are central: They are literal bodies of water but also metaphors, reflecting the friction between old and new, between fantasy and reality, between rural and urban.

That idea of reflection carries into Sikka’s process. After his journeys, the photographs are reworked through an extended scanning practice. Here, the scanner acts like a pond itself, its slow beam echoing the way an eye drifts across water. By moving and manipulating the prints during scanning, Sikka produces distortions that fracture the images. These interventions disrupt the surface of each photograph, turning Ripples in the Pond into a meditation on the fragility of memory and place. 

Ripples in the Pond by Bharat Sikka is published by Fw:Books and is available to buy here.