24 May,2026 11:17 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Sunhil Sippy. Pic/Rane Ashish
In Mumbai, remaining static is a luxury afforded either by circumstance, chance, or apathy. These vestiges of staticity, few and far between as they are, continue to draw photographic archivists and oral historians alike, who recognise that the best response to a "fast disappearing city" is often documentation. Recording a story before erasure is not just an act of preservation, but also a way of learning how to remember.
Photographer-filmmaker Sunhil Sippy's new coffee table book, Raceday (Pictor), through a series of 150-odd photographs taken within the environs of Mahalaxmi Racecourse over a decade, trains the lens on a world only ever known to its inhabitants and frequenters. In making the unfamiliar familiar, Sippy's pictorial keepsake, curated from over tens of thousands of images, offers a new way of seeing, making it another important volume in the growing tome of archives about the city.
This documentation, however, began - and by Sippy's own admission - in a "gentle and purposeless fashion". Having been raised in London, he had only ever heard snatches about how his paternal grandfather, film producer GP Sippy, owned racehorses and that his maternal grandmother Maya Ramchand, a steel mill baroness, had for the longest time rented a box at the racecourse. When Sippy started photographing the place way back in 2015, these legacies, alien to him, were the least of the reasons bringing him there. He saw it instead as a public space, which had remained unchanged, sandwiched within a neighbourhood where the skyline was growing vertically at a pace that was both, uncontrolled and haphazard.
Curious, he kept returning to Mahalaxhmi Racecourse, his Leica monochrome in hand, but without any agenda. "I was beginning to see patterns in my work," Sippy, 55, admits now, when we meet at his Tardeo residence.
But it was only sometime later, during dinner at the home of one of his oldest friends, where he happened to meet Subhag Singh, horse trainer at the Royal Western India Turf Club (RWITC) and racing administrator Shujaat Hussain, that things took a different turn. "I showed them some of the images I had made, one of them being that of a single horse in the mist, and their jaws dropped," he recalls.
Sippy was immediately extended an invitation to photograph the racecourse. This unprecedented access led him deeper into the world of horses, trainers, jockeys, and spectators making him realise that there was more to this "emerald" than meets the eye.
Prayers before the race, 2016
From the outset, Sippy was clear that he wasn't merely interested in photographing the movers and shakers - the elite club of society - that always came to the races dressed to the nines in their best hats, flowy chiffons, and fitting suits. By then, the influencer culture had also started taking over in a big way, and this archetypal image of glamour at the racecourse was only becoming elusive. What he saw around him, he says, was rather unappealing.
Sippy was instead drawn to other stories, like the horses rolling in the mud, enjoying a pool bath, or leaving at the break of dawn with their trainers for warm ups, even as he froze their gallops and slow canter on his camera. So, were the jockeys who went about their day in the jockey rooms, on the turf, or behind the starting gates, sometimes contemplative, meditative, and on other occasions, part of the mad frenzy. As a photographer, Sippy tried to be as invisible as possible, hoping to capture their sense of personhood in his images. "I came to realise that these jockeys were not really thinking about gambling or the money that's been bet on them. In my estimation, the jockey must have been thinking about the health of his horse, his own weight - he can't even eat a biscuit, because if his weight increases even by a gram, everything changes on race day - and about survival, surviving the race and not being accidentally trampled upon."
He remembers photographing the oldest trainer and Subhag's maternal grandfather, Uttam Singh, who'd just turned 100. The images show tender moments between the horse and Singh - in one, the horse nudges Singh off balance and the centenarian falls to the ground, but returns on his feet in no time, unfazed. "When he passed on a few years later, Subhag called me and said he'd like to have those pictures. It broke my heart. I knew then that this work had to continue as it meant something to them," says Sippy, who has previously published The Opium of Time, a collection of over 100 monochrome and colour analog landscapes of the city.
For a body of work that had an aimless start, with Sippy responding mostly to his instincts and chance encounters, he confesses that it took a more intentional direction after news of the RWITC's 99-year lease for the Mahalaxmi Racecourse expiring gained steam. "The lease ran out in 2013, but it really made news in 2022." Suddenly, everyone was talking about what was to become of the racecourse, with all kinds of rumours doing the rounds, including plans for a theme park. Last reported, the BMC was planning to rebrand the 295-acre open space into the New York-styled Central Park. "Intentionality doesn't usually exist in my work," Sippy confesses, but he made an exception. "Since 2022, I started to photograph with a new purpose, knowing that this place may go. The idea was preservation."
During this time, he moved his gaze slightly outwards and beyond the comforts of monochrome, photographing the frantic gamblers, punters, racing enthusiasts, and curious public drawn to the razzmatazz around horseracing. It's also what makes it a more eclectic photobook, thoughtfully designed by Zeenat Kulavoor of Bombay Duck Designs, with a cover that recreates a page from the Cole Racebook, which usually lists everything from the names of the horses, their lineage, weight, owners, trainers, and jockeys.
Not one to shy away from talking about his favourite image in the collection, Sippy says it has to be the one of the jockey praying in front of a wall with framed images of Gods, before going into a race. What fascinated him most was that it had Gods from across faiths. "To me, that image reflects the whole of India," he says.
While the book has given a sense of finality to the documentation, Sippy sees himself returning to the racecourse again. "The world inside [the racecourse] may not change, but the public space, which forms its backdrop, is going to transform. That's compelling. For me, this work is not about racing, it's about a changing city."
