What do you do with someone's passport you lost? This is what an Indian artist did

While Indian artist Radhika Chitalia was arranging her late father’s papers and old documents, she found his passport, only to find herself in front of a document that seemed ordinary on the surface, but for her it carried a meaning that went beyond being merely proof of identity. She couldn't get rid of it or put it back in the box, so she chose to give its empty pages a new life, turning them into a space where she preserved feelings, memories, and what she never had a chance to say to her father.

Through her artistic project, which she published on her official Instagram account, Chitalia redrew the pages of the passport in a style inspired by the art of Mughal miniatures, to create a personal work of art in which loss meets memory and imagination. What began as a family project quickly went beyond its initial scope and reached a wider audience, after many found a space in it to express their grief and the small things they kept from their loved ones after their passing.

“The experience of loss changes our relationship with everyday things, turning what once seemed ordinary into something of value simply because it belonged to someone we love,” Chitalia says in an interview with Ofoq News in Arabic. For her, filling out the pages of her father's passport became a way to give one of these objects a second life.

The trips her father couldn't take were part of the background to this work. He dreamed of traveling with her mother after retirement, but he never had the opportunity to realize those plans.

However, Chitalia did not use the passport to literally document the places he wished to visit, but rather turned it into a space for feelings. The Indian artist likens this process to the practice of free or expressive writing, which allows a person to let his thoughts flow onto the page without censorship or prior attempt to organize them.

But she replaced words with pictures, and various feelings appeared on the pages, from humor and joy to sadness, regret, longing, and loss. Chitalia says that none of these elements were pre-planned, but rather came spontaneously out of her experience, page by page.

Her choice of Mughal miniature art is linked to her interest in traditional Indian arts. She points out that the popular Madhubani drawing and the Kalamkari art based on drawing and printing on fabrics have always been a source of inspiration for her, but the Mughal miniatures remained the closest to her style, and she is based on this artistic school in her technique, while offering her own interpretation of it.

Chitalia uses fine brushes made from squirrel hair, along with natural pigments whenever possible, while gradually building each image, one brushstroke at a time. For her, the importance of this technique lies not only in its precision, but also in the time and focus it imposes on the artist, as it is a process that cannot be rushed, and at the same time gives it a contemplative and therapeutic space.

It took about four months to complete the passport, before the project moved from its family scope to a wider audience, as Chitalia did not expect the work to leave her family circle, before her pictures reached the public via the Internet. Although she admits that turning the project into a business would be her passion as an artist, she recognizes the value of personal experience before that, encouraging others to go through it themselves to process their grief in their own way, while leaving the door open to the possibility that her view of this may change in the future.