In the summer of 2021, when the world retreated indoors and human life slipped into a strange, suspended quiet, Rohit Chawla did the opposite. He went out. Straight into the rain-lashed, emptied beaches of Goa, where the monsoon raged uninterrupted and the silence felt almost confrontational.
What he found there—apart from thunderous skies and a sea that never stopped moving—were dogs. Dozens of them. Hungry. Skeletal. Bewildered. And yet, quietly resilient.
Those dogs would become the heart of Rain Dogs—a title suggested by poet and novelist Jeet Thayil—an elegiac, deeply introspective body of work that reads like a visual essay on abandonment, survival, and the odd, life-saving companionship that can emerge during crisis. The photos were recently exhibited as part of India Photo Festival in Hyderabad.
Chawla, who has spent four decades photographing people—actors, designers, politicians, public figures—calls 2021 the first moment in his career when “silence became the only subject available.” Goa’s beaches were emptied of tourists and locals alike. “Everyone I knew was shutting their doors to escape the pandemic,” he recalls. “I sought refuge under the monsoon skies. I couldn’t imagine talking to walls or pacing around the house. I needed the sea.”
What he didn’t expect was company.
With cafés shut and tourism erased, the stray dogs of Ashwem and Morjim lost even their informal ecosystem of leftovers and feeders. Their ribs jutted out. Their eyes tracked every passing human. “It broke my heart to see them so emaciated,” Chawla says. “They had been completely forgotten. In our panic for food and oxygen, they had slipped out of the frame.”
Based out of a shuttered hotel in Ashwem—one room opened just for him—Chawla began walking nearly 20 kilometres a day. Part routine, part self-preservation. The dogs fell in step. At first, out of hope for food. Later, out of what he calls an unspoken understanding. “Someone once said dogs find the people who need them,” he says. “I think it’s true. I fed them whenever I could, but the bond wasn’t about food. In some strange way, they were rescuing me too.”
The photographs that emerged from those long, rain-soaked walks are unlike anything Chawla has made before. Known for crisp stylisation and graphic minimalism, he found the monsoon to be an unruly but perfect collaborator. “The clouds, the tide, the light—nothing obeyed me,” he says. “Unlike my human subjects, I couldn’t coax the dogs to turn or pose. Every frame was a negotiation with nature.”
When the rains destroyed his cameras, he kept going—shooting on his iPhone, which became his only reliable witness.
The images are stark and quietly devastating: a lone dog dwarfed by a sky bruised with thunderclouds; a line of strays moving in silhouette along a foaming shoreline; a drenched animal staring straight into the lens, unafraid, as if asking a question that doesn’t need words. The restraint is deliberate. “Good design is about subtraction,” Chawla says. “These photographs became my quietest, most introspective work. They were a frame around my own vulnerability.”
Seen now, years later, Rain Dogs feels uncannily precise. It was Chawla’s wife, Saloni, who urged him to revisit the images. “To my surprise,” he admits, “I found that they told a story bigger than I had intended. In some ways it’s deeply political.”
The politics is understated but unmistakable. During the lockdown, thousands of indie dogs across India were abandoned, forgotten, or cut off from their fragile food networks. “Our indie dogs are incredibly intelligent and resilient,” Chawla says. “But we treat them as second-class beings. Pedigree dogs are status symbols; these local breeds are ignored. The pandemic exposed the scale of that cruelty.”
In the exhibition, the dogs are never background detail. They are protagonists. The beaches turn mythic, the skies heavy with metaphor. These animals mirror fear, isolation, and endurance—reflecting not just the anxieties of the pandemic but the emotional disorientation shared by millions.
Ultimately, Rain Dogs is about companionship forged under pressure, and about being held together by something unexpected. The dogs, in their unvarnished vulnerability, become Chawla’s stand-ins. “Howsoever broken their lives,” he says quietly, “they were in a strange way restoring mine.”
By choosing to see them—really see them—Chawla recasts these dogs not as strays but as witnesses to one of the darkest years of our time. And as reminders that empathy, even in isolation, is never a one-way act.