KALA PANI: 1873 - 2023 is an ongoing series of oil paintings portraying indentured Indian women who were photographed as colonial objects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on plantations in the Caribbean throughout Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. Although the original images of these South Asian women appeared on postcards captured by European photographers, my project magnifies their images on large wood canvases. The scale of these paintings represents my attempt to magnify the often neglected histories and lives of these women. Painting a series of portraits of these women is my way to reclaim their status as exoticized objects under the colonial gaze. By using the medium of oil, I am reclaiming a traditional technique used to create portraits of European nobility by paying homage to the lives of these women from the South Asian diaspora whom history has merely footnoted.