Gianni Berengo Gardin was fascinated by Mahatma Gandhi while still at school. When he had an opportunity to travel to India in 1977, he was inspired by Gandhi’s statement that the real India is to be found not in its cities, but in its countless villages. This is why it was the villages of India that Berengo Gardin decided to experience and photograph. ... The selection of 51 photographs from Berengo Gardin’s travels in India on display at the David Collection reflects the wide scope of his Indian motifs. The choice also takes into account the museum’s Indian holdings, as the photographs include a number of obvious parallels to a group of miniatures in the David Collection from the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. These “Company paintings” were made by Indian artists for English clients, and thus bear witness to a similar interest in documenting the India that Westerners discovered. The finest miniatures from the “Fraser albums,” in particular, present depictions of rural life that have an artistic kinship to Berengo Gardin’s photographs. They show real people, not romanticized impressions, who pose in the same way as the subjects in the photographs, wearing local garments and in some cases also set against a background of the same type of village architecture. Together, the photographs and miniatures consequently bear witness to a centuries-old continuity in Indian village communities, a continuity that has been challenged in the 21st century as India’s economy has grown and its metropolises have expanded explosively.