Dog day afternoons | Rohit Chawla’s ‘Rain Dogs’ showcases street dogs on Goa’s beaches

Rohit Chawla’s photographs of Goa’s beach dogs during its fierce monsoons and a harrowing pandemic are an expression of freedom and hope  

“These images are the quietest, most introspective work I’ve done,” says Rohit Chawla. The award-winning photographer is referring to Rain Dogs, an exhibit of photographic prints on paper and linen, from his upcoming eponymously titled book.

Imbued with a haunting quality, Chawla’s photographs of dogs in the rain on the beaches of Goa were taken as lockdown forced the world into isolation. “When I began shooting these pictures, more than turning a pack of neglected dogs into a photographer’s subject, I was trying to form a frame around my own vulnerability, my disparate thoughts,” he explains. “Someone once said that dogs have a way of finding people who need them. I think it’s true. Though I fed them whenever I was able to, the bond that grew between us wasn’t only to do with food.”

Chawla walked the desolate beaches to photograph a combination of his two loves: dogs and Goa’s monsoon, using mostly his iPhone, after losing three cameras to moisture. Beginning in 2021, his photography of dogs grew into an obsession over the next three years, ending in a book only after his wife Saloni Puri insisted he needed “an out” as well as an edit for the 10,000 photographs sitting in his camera.

And so, we have a photographer’s personal story, and a select series of Chawla’s emotionally charged images interspersed with notes from leading contemporary writers, including Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple, Shashi Tharoor, Girish Shahane, and Tishani Doshi.

The sparse images of strays, either solo or with a lone human figure in them, are in keeping with the spare style that defines Chawla’s larger body of work — led by “subtraction and a certain graphic minimalism”. A bare chested migrant worker, the “starting point” of the Rain Dogs series, says Chawla, stands looking out towards the vast sea of uncertainty as a stray dog sits beside him, perhaps in kinship or silent understanding. In another moving portrait, Chawla foregrounds an indie sitting alone, the vast expanse of sand, sky and sea the perfect backdrop for the dog; the master of his own fate.

Used to his subjects, including heads of state, listening to his direction as they pose for his camera, Chawla had to surrender to the agency of his subjects and the vagaries of nature in this case. “Beyond choosing the time of day and the quality of light, nothing was ever in my control. Unlike my human subjects, I couldn’t manipulate or coax the dogs to do my bidding, couldn’t predict the moods of the monsoon, or the sea’s erratic behaviour.” What reaches out from these seemingly quiet yet forceful images are moments of joy and connection, of dignity and compassion and, ironically, of a true sense of freedom of the spirit.

As Santosh Desai writes, “The stray dog is a creature who makes by the scruff of its scruffy neck, roaming the streets and finding sustenance where it can. There is nothing particularly heroic about strays, but in some ways, this is what real freedom looks like. It makes no promises and the rewards that it offers need to be extracted with hard fought grit, but you go where the spirit takes you.”