Clicked: two of each

Marriage to a Patel, may have opened the doors to homes with twins, but for the 53-year-old photographer Ketaki Sheth, it all began with a statistic. “One set out of 300 in every in any population are identical twins. It’s not Patel-specific. I had gone to a party in London and there were so many of them”, she says. The exhibition, ‘Twinspotting,’ has 30 pairs; the book with the same name, has 88. It is a singular work. It features the largest Indian immigrant community who started migrating even before independence to British colonies in Africa — the Sikhs built roads, the Patels built shops alongside. The only difficulty in shooting the Patel twins, says the photographer, was that “adult twins do not stay together, so I had to wait for a Diwali to get them.” The project also took Ketaki to 47 villages in Charotar, the Patel heartland in Gujarat. The British shopkeeper and the Indian farmer — the Patels who made it and those who didn’t — are the many faces of this story of the Indian diaspora.