It was an afternoon to remember. In the rays cast by a mellow winter sun, a fight was about to take place. But it waited, perhaps for the crowd to gather. In the meantime, two men posed for the camera. The photographer, who accompanied me to the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, known for its decades-long insurgency and a unique tapestry of tribal culture, clicked their happy faces.
The men weren’t the contenders. Their birds were, one a red cock and the other black in colour, geared up for a fight at a weekly haat in a remote village. Later, I learnt that cock fights happened in these places where hundreds of people gathered to buy and sell almost everything available under the sun. This was my first experience of a rural bazaar, often called haat-bazaar, in Bastar.