Going Back Home To Where I Came From

In September 2016, Mahtab Hussain travelled to Kashmir, the place his parents once called home. There he met extended family for the first time, including his great grandmother, and encountered the life he might have lived had history unfolded differently.

“I wanted the work to capture the profound feeling of returning to a place where close family members, once strangers to me, welcomed me with warmth and generosity. We spoke at length about my parents, especially my mother as a child. I walked the paths she once took, sat by the same well she had described, and visited our old home. It was an enormously transformative experience.”

While deeply personal, the project speaks to wider experiences of displacement and rediscovery shared across diasporic communities.

“I had always believed I would feel like an outsider in Kashmir, caught between two worlds. Instead, I felt an immediate and indescribable connection to the land. Yet just as I began to fall in love with it, I was reminded that it would never fully be mine. England was my home. The realisation was painful. It reawakened the familiar feeling of living between places, belonging completely to neither.”

New York Times
Featured coverage of Hussain’s journey into identity and belonging.
Huck Magazine
“Under political pressure they’re proud, noble and dignified individuals.”
The Guardian
A powerful and poetic reflection on home and displacement.
1854 Photography
Highlighted emotional and introspective portraiture.
The New Art Gallery Walsall
Celebrated insight into people and landscapes of Kashmir.
BBC
Coverage of the project in the context of migration and identity.