Dandaka is the fourth chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s seven-part project A Myth of Two Souls, a contemporary retelling of the Ramayana that the photographer has been pursuing since 2013. The book takes up the episode of Sita’s abduction by Ravana, following the mutilation of Surpanakha at the end of the previous chapter. Yogananthan traveled from north to south India retracing the itinerary of the epic’s heroes, and the resulting images move deliberately between fiction and reality.

The photographs are not reportage. Yogananthan works in colour, hand-painting and illustrating some prints while interspersing vernacular images, so that the sequence accumulates as a set of layers rather than a single documentary account. For this chapter he also folds in strips from a 1970s comic-book version of the epic, setting them alongside his own photographs. The mix of media is structural, not decorative: it allows thebook to hold several versions of the same story at once, and to acknowledge that the Ramayana has been rewritten and reinterpreted continuously since it was first recorded by the Sanskrit poet Valmiki around 300 BC.

Dandaka was published by Chose Commune in 2018 as a section-sewn hardcover with trimmed edges, 112 pages plus 13 inserts, measuring 24.5 by 30 cm. The book contains 51 photographs and 13 comic strips, designed by Kummer&Herrman, with text in French and English. It is a first edition.

As the fourth of seven planned volumes, Dandaka belongs to a sequence that gives it its fullest meaning, but it also stands on its own as a carefully constructed object in which photographs, comic strips, inserts, and design work together. Collectors interested in the photobook as a form, in contemporary engagements with epic narrative, or in Yogananthan’s practice—he is a self-taught photographer attached to silver photography and a co-founder of Chose Commune—will find here a substantial example of a long-term project being built chapter by chapter.