photo essay
a love letter to India
2026 : July
Portrayed – iconically – as the woman of Weylandts and (always) in black, Anna Weylandt unexpectedly finds herself returning, again and again, to a place bursting with colour
words & photography by Anna Weylandt
words and photography by Anna Weylandt
It took me a surprisingly long time to fall in love with India.
Which feels almost sacrilegious to admit now, because I have been travelling there for over ten years. I’ve actually lost count of how many times I’ve been. Seven? Eight? At this point, enough times to have very strong opinions about hotel breakfasts, domestic airport lounges and the exact amount of naan one woman can consume before it becomes medically concerning.
But India and I did not have an immediate love affair.
My first trip was to Noida – an industrial area outside Delhi, where I spent my first two visits staying in a deeply depressing business hotel. There was no romance. No palaces. No colour. Just traffic, a convention center and a breakfast buffet that seemed to actively resent me.
And the noise.
My God, the noise.
Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. HOOOOOT.
Everyone hooting at everyone, seemingly all the time. Cars, tuk-tuks, motorbikes, trucks. A constant wall of sound. I remember sitting in traffic completely overwhelmed by it all – the heat, the people, the movement, the sheer amount of everything happening at once.
I remember thinking: Oh my God. This place is not for me.
It was only when I travelled to Rajasthan for the first time that something shifted. I began to see India differently – and then, quite suddenly, I couldn’t stop looking.
I still remember driving into the old city of Jodhpur in a tuk-tuk, moving through the usual chaos – hooting, people, motorbikes, cows, markets, colour – when suddenly I saw an enormous elephant walking down the road.
A fucking elephant.
In the street.
Painted and adorned, casually making its way through the city while cars and tuk-tuks moved around it as though this were completely normal. Meanwhile, I was losing my mind. I practically launched myself out of the tuk-tuk to take a photograph.
I think that moment cracked India open for me. The extraordinary and the everyday existing right on top of each other.
The second moment was quieter, but somehow stayed with me even more.
It was March, and the bougainvillea was in bloom across Jaipur. White, electric pink, bright orange – spilling over walls and out of courtyards, set against the faded, crumbling pink of the old city. I remember feeling completely visually overstimulated. The beauty was in the contradiction: something vivid and alive against something ancient and slightly derelict.
I think that was the moment India got me.
And strangely, I seem to fall more in love with it every time I return.
There are, of course, the obvious things. The food is extraordinary. I now barely eat Indian food outside India because I have become completely insufferable about it. Nothing compares. The chapati, the roti, the naan. Curry for breakfast, lunch and dinner – a lifestyle I embrace with alarming ease.
But more than that, it is the people. The makers. The hospitality.
I am incredibly privileged to travel to India with a purpose. I go for work: to visit factories, develop product, meet suppliers and understand how things are made. And because of that, I get to experience parts of the country I would probably never otherwise see.
We spend hours on the road, driving through Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Six, sometimes seven hours at a time. You watch the landscape change through the window. You stop for chai. You see things that make absolutely no sense and somehow perfect sense at the same time. A family of five on a motorbike. A cow in the middle of a highway. Trucks painted like moving artworks. And always, the hooting.
India has a way of reminding you that your schedule is merely a suggestion.
Then there are the workshops, factories, stone yards and small making communities that exist far beyond the tourist trail. Watching glass being blown. Walking through enormous stone yards. Seeing carving, casting and finishing processes with my own eyes. Watching objects move from raw material to something that will eventually sit in someone’s home thousands of kilometres away.
There is something deeply grounding about seeing how things are actually made. In my world, we spend so much time talking about design, aesthetics and finished objects. India constantly takes me back to the hand behind the object. The person who knows the material. The repetition of a skill passed down and perfected over years. The mess, the heat, the dust and the extraordinary beauty that comes out of it.
Over time, I have built this strange memory bank of India: moments of beauty, chaos, humour and complete sensory overload. The first time I saw the Taj Mahal. The first elephant in the street. Bougainvillea against pink walls. Long drives through landscapes I would never have seen had I simply flown from one beautiful hotel to another.
And every time I return, I discover a new layer.
On my most recent trip, it was fashion. I went fabric shopping in Jaipur, had clothes custom-made and promptly came home with an entirely new set of ideas. This seems to happen every time I go now. I arrive with one purpose and leave with another project.
That, I think, is the privilege of returning to the same country again and again.
You stop trying to “do” India. You return to the same people. Conversations continue. Relationships deepen. You notice different things. Each trip opens another door, and suddenly there is another reason to come back.
I still have an ever-growing list. Chandigarh has been sitting at the top of it for years. There are cities I haven’t seen, crafts I don’t understand yet, people I want to return to, and ideas that I suspect will only reveal themselves once I’m there.
India was not love at first sight for me. It was too loud. Too much. Too overwhelming. Too many people, too many colours, too much hooting.
And now?
I miss the noise.
Seven trips. Maybe eight.
I’ve lost count.
And I’m nowhere near done.
