This Indian photographer’s embroidered portraits dignify domestic abuse victims in North India

‘Heena’, © Spandita Malik, courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery, 2025

Over two years, the New York-based photographer traversed the hinterlands of Rajasthan and Punjab, photographing survivors of domestic abuse. But her process didn’t end at documenting the women. Once the portraits were taken, she transposed them onto homespun khadi cloth and sent them back to the subjects. The women were free to do whatever they wished with their portraits—embroider, paint, tear, stitch, scratch out. Parween embroidered three women around her, her little army. This work of art, in addition to the portraits of women whom Malik consciously sought out, is part of her ‘Nā́rī’ series. When other women heard about ‘Nā́rī’, they reached out to Malik with their own stories, encouraging friends who had suffered through the same atrocities to come forward as well. These portraits became part of a new series linked to ‘Nā́rī’ titled ‘Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance’.

Gaining the women’s trust to photograph them in their own homes, the same sites of violence where they had been abused, could not have been an easy feat. It helped that Malik wasn’t an outsider, her gaze wasn’t white, and she wasn’t a reporter trying to extract a story. Many of them were women she had met while working at not-for-profit centres for survivors of domestic abuse across Punjab and Rajasthan. “The women in these self-help groups would work on traditional embroideries like phulkari and tell me about their friends who hadn’t made it to the centres yet but work out of their homes,” Malik says. “They took me on long walks in their villages to make me meet these friends. That’s how the network grew.”