At a small pavement stall in Pushkar, packs of postcards are neatly laid out beside handmade Banjara-style bags. The woman selling them, Pappu Devi, looks away when asked about the photograph on the postcards: It’s her own, taken more than 20 years ago. Back then, she was a street seller, when a photographer at the fair stopped to capture what was called her ‘tigress eyes’. The image travelled beyond Pushkar, finding its way to postcard racks across India.
Now in her late 30s, Devi still lives in the same town, married to a safari driver. The postcards still sell, but she has never received recognition or payment for them. “People should have some respect,” she says, at the recently concluded Pushkar Mela.
Unlike ‘Mona Lisa’, a girl named Moni Bhonsle from the Banjara community who was “discovered” at the Kumbh Mela earlier this year and swiftly found fame on social media, with an upcoming Bollywood debut, Devi didn’t get the same attention or contracts on her way. This doesn’t stop Devi from feeling happy for Bhonsle. “Yes, I know about her,” she says. “I’m happy for her.” After a pause, she adds, “What is in her destiny is hers, and what is in my destiny is mine.”
Her three daughters sometimes help at the stall, calling out to tourists to buy the mirror-work bags. Two of them have inherited her light, striking eyes, inviting photographers. Visitors are still intrigued by pictures, asking if they are lenses.
When asked if she is from the Banjara community, as her wares might suggest, Devi shakes her head. “I’m not,” she says. “Someone told me to dress like one because it suited my eyes.”
Behind the two-minute fame of these so-called Banjaran eyes — from the Kumbh Mela in Uttar Pradesh to the Pushkar fair in Rajasthan — lies a quieter story of community itself. Perhaps inspired by Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl,’ these images continue to fascinate photographers and audiences alike, but the women often fade from sight.
Meanwhile, Banjara crafts, which were once celebrated for their bold, hand-stitched clothes and ornaments, are dying out. The digital world scrolls on, but in Pushkar, Pappu Devi still sells such craft, the postcards of her younger self resting beside the goods she sells, long after the camera lens have shut down.