For most of us, the notion of home is intricately interwoven with family ties. It’s a place where you grow up amidst the din and drama of parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, distant relatives and more expansively, within a particular social and ethnic community. In What Was Home, however, Dileep Prakash’s photographs explore “homes” far removed from all of this – his alma mater Mayo College, Ajmer, and seventeen other residential schools scattered around India.

Shot in rich, textured monochrome, the images form a moving tribute to these educational institutes, often places where lifelong friendships and bonds are formed. The photographs are purposely unpeopled and empty to avoid students being the central focus rather than the rooms themselves. They aren’t desolate interiors, however, and bear traces of bustling student life. A picture of a dormitory in St Paul’s School, Darjeeling, shows a row of neatly made beds – each with a row of sneakers placed underneath; blazers hang from pegs on the wall. You can almost hear the sound of children playing drifting in from the large open windows. Another image, of Mayo College, shows a cluster of hastily hung white towels in a Spartan washroom; running footsteps seem to echo from the stone floors. At Lawrence School, Sanawar, rows of mugs and toothbrushes line the shelves above white wash basins and mirrors.

Deliberate or not, Prakash’s photographs also seem haunted – by nostalgia and spirits of the past. In a rather bizarre echo of Argentina's Cueva de los Manos (Cave of Hands), a photo from The Scindia School, Gwalior, shows a lime wash wall covered in children’s handprints. Also striking is a picture of washing lines at the same school where translucent white vests flutter like ghosts in the breeze, in another a curtain dances like a spirit over an empty bed. In a biology lab at Sacred Heart Secondary School, Dalhousie, a skeleton gazes eerily from an open cupboard, while at Oak Grove, Jharipani, a row of bulky coats hang like bodies on a wall.

Apart from being steeped in atmosphere, Prakash’s photographs also quietly present these educational institutes as repositories of influence and power. Their lofty corridors and high-ceilinged classrooms are resonant with colonial history, and carry the weight of pre-Independence India. A photograph of The Doon School, Dehradun, shows a polished wooden panel with busts of their former British headmasters.

Prakash is armed with the experience of being a “boarder” himself and perhaps from this springs an observant eye with the ability to capture particularly poignant spaces within these schools. He understands the duality inherent in the boarding school experience - the abundant joy and aching loneliness.