Silent circus

Across India travelling circuses keep performing as their audiences disappear. Silent Circus looks beyond spectacle to precarious labour, endurance and the quiet resilience of performers sustaining a fading world.

Silent circus

For the past three years I have been following travelling circuses across India. As a child, the circus meant colour, music, lights and wonder. Today, many of these circuses are struggling to survive. Audiences are shrinking, costs are rising and the spaces where they can perform are becoming harder to find. Some travel from town to town, putting up tents wherever they can. Others are occasionally able to perform in an auditorium but eventually return to their tents. And yet every day they perform. The longer I have spent with them, the more I have realised that this is not simply a story about a fading form of entertainment. It is about a community whose lives have been shaped by the circus in very different ways. For some it is a family inheritance. Their parents and grandparents belonged to this travelling world, and they grew up learning its rhythms almost as naturally as they learned to walk. For others the circus became a way to survive when life outside it offered very little. I have met performers who were rejected by their families because of the work they chose, and others who found their way into the circus after falling into debt during the pandemic. I have seen parents carry their children from one town to another, while others leave their children behind with relatives so they can continue working. Despite its difficulties, the circus still provides them with work, belonging and for some the only community and way of life they know. What stays with me most is the distance between the performance and the life behind it. Under the lights we see the performer. We do not always see the person who has travelled for days, lived in a tent, worried about money, missed a child, cared for a family, grown tired or simply carried on because there were performances to do that day. Silent Circus is about those lives between performances. About people who continue to work, laugh, worry, love, struggle and perform even as public attention fades. We live in a time when attention is measured in likes, views and followers. These performers continue without the certainty of being seen. I continue to photograph them because, despite everything, they continue to find a reason to perform. What does it mean to keep performing when the audience is slowly disappearing?