Chola Maati is the product of over four years (2022–2025) Komal Bedi Sohal spent photographing the rituals that mark a life from birth to death in the tribal Pardhan Gond community of Patangarh, Madhya Pradesh.
Instead of just documenting the ceremonies, Sohal focused her gaze on the oft-unseen moments that surround them: the waiting, the gestures, the community, the ordinary life where ritual blends into every day in perfect balance with nature.
Sohal returned to Patangarh again and again, not as a visitor passing through, but as someone willing to sit with a family before anything "happens." Chola Maati, which translates loosely to "body of clay," takes its name from this closeness: the idea that the Gond way of life is inseparable from the soil, the cattle, the river that runs through their days.
This effort was undertaken at a time when ancient practices are under threat from migration and the internet to everything else that pulls people further away from their roots. The race to preserve this way of life and these traditions underpins the urgency behind this project and the need for its existence.
The photographs move between the intimate and the communal, a child fed by hand, an elder lost in thought, women gathered in laughter, a boy leaping into water at the end of a long day.
Working entirely in black and white, Sohal strips away color to focus entirely on form, gesture, and light. The texture of bark, the sheen of water on skin, the geometry of hands at work. The absence of color also lends the images a timeless quality, as though these moments could belong to any decade, underscoring both the endurance and the fragility of these traditions.
Ultimately, Chola Maati is less a document of ritual than a meditation on belonging to land, to family, to a way of seeing the world that is slowly disappearing. In photographing what surrounds the sacred rather than the sacred itself, Sohal offers a portrait of a community still whole, still rooted, even as the forces of change close in around it.
