[Young Indian girl who lives in a fishing village on the sea coast near Bombay]

This mesmerizing image, by the famed photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, shows a young girl from the Indigenous Koli (fishing community) of the larger Bombay (Mumbai) coastline. The cloth covering her head provides respite from the heat, and a small jute fiber bundle atop balances a cropped-out basket holding produce.

Following the monumental style of Bourke-White’s “Great Migration” series about the Partition of India in 1947 for LIFEMagazine, this shot places the subject at the turn of India’s independence and calls attention to her community’s precarious existence. To this day, the Kolis face challenges and live on the city’s peripheries, their occupation curtailed amid rampant development and commercialization of the shoreline and the fishing industry.

Here, the girl’s spearlike gaze is distant, and even though the camera creates an aloofness between her and the viewer, it’s clear that she stands firm and tall. Postindependence, Koli women have mobilized to assert their land rights amidst the rise of global capitalism in India’s wealthiest city. They have created cooperative societies to work on climate change, pollution, marine conservation, and industrialization, as well as ethnographic archives to foster knowledge and engagement around their history and culture.

—Ayesha Matthan, PhD candidate