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I wish I could say that I had a closer relationship with my Nani, but like many children of immigrants, our ties were strained by distance and language. My mother’s mother was a quiet person. When I was young, Nani would often come from Pakistan to visit my Ammie and Khala (aunt) in Canada. Because Nani’s English was limited and my Urdu was poor, I cannot recall any profound conversations between us. To her questions, I remember responding “Muje nehi patha he,” meaning I don’t know, a phrase I had mastered in Urdu by about age five. She would giggle in response.

In 2015, at my Khala’s home in Toronto, I found images of Nani in an album. It had been damaged when the basement flooded, and Khala asked me to repair the album for her. Most of the photos were small black and white images, yellowing with age, held together by fifty-year-old Scotch tape. This album included photos of my grandparents when they were newlyweds and my mother with her siblings when they were children in Karachi, Pakistan.

As I went through the album, I came across the images used in this project—of Nani dressed in my grandfather’s clothing, the photographs taken by him. I asked my parents about them immediately. The images were not a secret; Ammie and her siblings knew of their existence, but what they knew had been pieced together over the years. The relationship they had with their parents was a formal one and they would not have dared to ask them directly. It was not a child’s place to ask about the personal photographs of their parents.

Gulam Abbas Tapal and Rhubab Tapal, my Nana and Nani, were married in 1948 in Karachi, one year after the Partition of India and Pakistan. They both came from upper middle-class Bohra Muslim families, a close-knit community with roots in Gujarat, India. Both families had been living in Karachi for many generations. In the community and at home they spoke Gujarati. After Partition the official language of Pakistan became Urdu, but at school my grandfather studied in English.

Some of the images in this project were taken during my grandparents’ honeymoon in Quetta, the capital of the province of Balochistan, a mountain region close to the border with Afghanistan. This northern region of Pakistan continues to be a popular vacation spot because of its cold, lush and mountainous landscape. My grandparents stayed with distant family members while there. It was likely the first time in their adult lives that they were allowed to be alone together.

Children appear in many of the found photographs of Nani. In the image of Nani in the garden, two young girls with long braids are playing with a paternal figure. I see my position in this project as akin to the position of these children—as someone who is looking and attempting to make sense of this performance. For this reason, I created self-portraits in which I re-enact Nani’s poses but also re-enact the poses of the children; often my figure is only partially visible or out of focus. This keeps the focus on the original artifacts and also acknowledges my hand in bringing these images to light and unpacking their significance. In some of the self-portraits, I wear a white ribbed tank top, or banyan as it’s called in Urdu. I chose to wear it because it’s something that my father still wears as an undershirt, and I used to wear it as a child before I hit puberty. To me, the banyan represents a state of being in one’s body that is at times masculine, feminine, and childlike.

My Nana was very particular about photography and documenting family occasions, insisting that my mother and her siblings had their photo taken at a studio every year on their birthdays. He had a passion for the arts, although he was never able to pursue them himself. When considering where my Nani and Nana might have gotten the idea for gender play, I instantly thought of Bollywood cinema of the 1940s. All the pictures are staged with different props, poses and outfits, and have the feel of a movie set. I know that my grandparents were avid cinema-goers in their youth—I’d heard stories of my mother sneaking off to the theatre with her Dadi, my Nana’s mother, then running into Nana himself alone at the cinema.

Rosie Thomas suggests that Bollywood cinema of this time employed techniques of “the mimicry we associate with sites of anticolonial struggle.” During the Partition era, many Indian filmmakers looked to figures from pre-colonization to inspire public support for the independence movement. One of these figures is known as the virangana. Kathryn Hansen describes the virangana as a “woman who manifests the qualities of virya or heroism,” a type of character in Indian folklore dating back to the Mughal period, and commonly depicted in male dress. Both authors discuss the Bollywood actress Fearless Nadia as a virangana figure. In many of her film roles she wore boots, trousers, masks and cloaks, and was famous for her stunt work, such as fighting and horse-riding. In Baghdad ka Jadoo (1956), she even dresses as a man to woo a princess and fool the king.

When I look at these images of my grandmother, it’s clear to me that Nani’s performance is not just about gender but also about representing ideals of modernity. Educated under the British system, the modern ideals taught to my Nani and Nana would have been modelled after the colonizer. In this process of re-enactment, Nani’s performance expresses this sense of mimicry or double theatricality. She is not only performing the role of a man, but she is performing the role of an Indian man who is performing the role of a British man, or a subject mimicking their ruler. Nani is pushing up against patriarchal society while being embedded in it.

Another apparent symbol that leads me to consider the duality of Nani’s performance is The Children’s Dictionary she is holding in one of the photographs, and which I hold in one of the self-portraits. The book is from a set of illustrated dictionaries given to my Nana by a schoolteacher, and were beloved by the whole family. The dictionaries were produced by a British publisher and include racially insensitive illustrations. For example, one illustration shows racialized people from all over the world happily offering gifts to two British children, perpetuating the narrative that colonies were happily contributing their resources to the British Empire.

I began this project from a place of intuition and activated it through what I learnt from my mother’s memories and history. From my perspective as a maker working in the West, I see these photographs as complicating what we expect historical images of South Asian women to look like and depict. From my perspective as a daughter and granddaughter, I see evidence of a young couple at the height of their love for one another. There are socio-political layers beneath this act of performance, but alongside them run currents of romance, youth, liberation and the hidden lives of our elders, which children do not often have the opportunity to witness. Through these images I can interact with a version of Nani that I did not have access to in my life.

Text and images from this piece were first published in Dear Nani by Zinnia Naqvi (Anchorless Press, 2021).