A landscape greets us, from grass to the clouds high above, covering the hilltops, trees spread across and rocks in the front, all in black and white. This vastness is interrupted by a goat standing in the centre of the page, looking straight at the camera. The third page shows a child standing in front of a tin hut. These three atmospheric photos appear before the title page, as if already setting the stage for the discussion that the natural world came much before humans set foot on the land. How then can a select set of people ruin the landscape and communities that have come to cohabit the space?

Tarun Bhartiya’s first photobook, Em No Nahi, published posthumously, captures the matriarch of Domiasiat, Kong Spillity Lyngdoh Langrin’s resistance against uranium mining by the Atomic Minerals Division of the Indian government. Bhartiya was a documentary filmmaker, photographer, poet in Hindi, and a politically engaged image-maker whose work was deeply rooted in the landscapes and movements of Northeast India.

Even though he began living in Shillong when he was nine years old, he has been called “Dkhar”, an outsider. It never stopped him from engaging with the politics of the region. The images in the...

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