WOMEN IN UNIFORM

Women in Uniform

Pravin Talan
Expanded and updated: 29 September 2026

She had steel in her eyes. Yet her voice was calm and restrained as she told me about the night militants she was chasing with her Special Operations Group team disappeared into fields of tall grass.

She could barely see ahead. The darkness, the adrenaline, the blinding grass made it impossible. Then she sensed movement and found herself facing the barrel of an AK-47.

She fired first.

It was only one of the extraordinary stories of her life.

I had met and photographed her in Nagaland. Lt Gen R. K. Loomba, AVSM, then Corps Commander, 3 Corps, had introduced her as a police officer who had undertaken dangerous operations against dreaded militants in the Valley, eliminating many in the process. But hearing what she had survived, and how she herself had become a target, was something else. Her name was Shaheeda Parveen.

Portrait of police officer Shaheeda Parveen, photographed in Nagaland

Shaheeda Parveen, photographed in Nagaland. Nothing in the stillness of this portrait tells you how many armed encounters she had survived—or that she had become a target herself.

When I published her photographs with her story on my blog, many people outside Jammu and Kashmir came to know her. The organisers of the GR8! Women Awards invited her to Mumbai, where Aamir Khan honoured her alongside other accomplished women. It showed me the good that could come from giving a woman’s work both a powerful image and the space to be understood.

The first woman in uniform who had made that kind of impression on me was IPS officer Renuka Shastri, posted as ASP Traffic in Agra. She was honest, committed and daring. Politicians could not make her bend; neither could anyone else. The city knew it. She later became known as Renuka Mishra. I had no photography project in mind when I first watched her at work, but I remembered what her authority did to the behaviour of people around her.

I had already known what fearlessness looked like at home. At eighteen, my mother would sleep alone near the jungle fields to protect them, a gun beneath her pillow. My nani and dadi were strong women, as was my sister Poonam Talan. Their strength was part of the world in which I grew up. Renuka showed me how that strength could take public form in a uniform.

Years later, while I was abroad on an international production, a colleague showed me a viral clip comparing women in foreign forces with an Indian policewoman filmed poorly at a rally. She had been reduced to a joke, and through her an entire country’s women in uniform were being judged. I was working to capture the beauty of the world while the women serving my own country remained so little seen. I needed to do something about that.

Once I began looking, I found a much larger story than the one most of us had been shown. Our attention went naturally to the Army. Yet a country has to guard its borders and its people within those borders every day. Women served in the Border Security Force, CRPF, Rapid Action Force, CISF, Sashastra Seema Bal, police, Army, Navy and Coast Guard. There were firefighters too. Some had broken formidable barriers, but their stories were scattered across separate organisations and fleeting reports. I wanted to bring them into one field of vision.

At the Wagah-Attari border, I photographed a BSF woman with a rocket launcher beside the barbed wire. Winter fog could reduce visibility almost to nothing, especially at night. The weight on her shoulder was real. So was the possibility that she might have to use it. Another BSF officer, Priyanka Kumari, said it in a line I have never forgotten: “Borders and bullets don’t know the difference.”

In the jungle, a CRPF woman handled a light machine gun through punishing terrain. CoBRA, the CRPF’s specialised jungle warfare force, trains for anti-Maoist operations in which a harmless-looking small tree can conceal an explosive and a stream may be poisoned. Commandos learn to move for miles at night without a torch, without giving away their position. The Rapid Action Force goes towards a riot behind helmets and shields. At an international airport, a CISF woman has to maintain her vigilance through hours when nothing appears to happen, because the one lapse that matters may come without warning.

CRPF Valley QAT commando on night patrol

Headlights cut through the dark as a Valley QAT commando moves with her team. On a night patrol, what lies beyond that patch of light demands their full attention.

CoBRA commando during jungle warfare training

CoBRA — water and jungle training
Water up to her neck, weapon above it. In CoBRA’s jungle warfare training, the terrain itself becomes an obstacle she must cross without surrendering her readiness.

CISF Special Security Group
Low to the ground, eye fixed along the weapon, she prepares for a threat that may give her only a moment to respond..

Usha Kiran wanted that difficult ground. She pressed to join a male CoBRA unit and train alongside its commandos, becoming its first woman CRPF officer. Bastar was no abstraction for her. She had seen what a blast could do to a colleague and still chose to serve there. When Vogue later named her its Young Achiever of the Year, she came to the stage in uniform and dedicated the honour to the personnel whose blood and sweat sustain the service. I had photographed one woman; what she insisted the audience see was the force behind her.

Usha Kiran.

The demands change from service to service. An Army engineer learns to bring a heavy trawl tank through obstacles so others can pass. In bomb disposal, concentration and precision leave no room for a careless movement. When I photographed then Major Shikha Bhadauria with the trawl tank and in a bomb disposal exercise, I was looking at skills that could be decisive in a fraction of a second. Today, as Colonel Shikha Bhadauria, she commands 32 Border Roads Task Force under the Border Roads Organisation’s Project BEACON in North Kashmir.

Flying a fighter aircraft means mastering the speed, the roar, the physical strain and the decisions that cannot wait. Flying a small Coast Guard helicopter over a violent sea demands another kind of nerve. Rupal Kaur Lamba flew a Chetak into severe monsoon weather off Goa on a search mission, with high seas below her. On land, a firefighter enters a burning building in protective gear, moving towards flames and heat while everyone else is trying to get out.

Before their voyage, I photographed Indian Navy officers of the INSV Tarini crew. Their boat was only 56 feet long. Out at sea, a vessel that size can seem no sturdier than a child’s paper boat, thrown about by water that stretches beyond the horizon. Think of the nights, the distance from shore, the loneliness, the knowledge that a storm will not care who you are. The crew completed its circumnavigation of the world.

Pravin Talan photographing Indian Navy officers aboard INSV Tarini

Photographing Indian Navy officers aboard INSV Tarini before they took a 56-foot boat across the world’s oceans. Soon, the shore—and everything familiar—would be far behind them.

I met women drawn to the uniform for very different reasons. One BSF woman told me that, as the shy youngest of four sisters, she watched the respect with which her village welcomed an Army friend when he returned in uniform. She persuaded him to buy her one. He did, but told her the respect attached to it could not be bought. She would have to earn that herself. She hung it on the wall and stared at it through the night. By morning, she had decided that she would.

Others joined to challenge injustice they had known personally, to defend the country, or because service offered work, dignity and security. I watched women officers pursue cases of domestic cruelty, missing children and human trafficking with an intensity that stayed with me. Sashastra Seema Bal officer Tanvi Shukla, who dealt with trafficking, put the stakes plainly: “No woman in the world deserves that her flesh and soul be treated like a commodity.” Many women had to work harder in ranks long dominated by men, as though each of them were also being asked to justify the presence of women there at all.

In our spiritual tradition, Shakti is a powerful symbol of the Goddess. I think of that symbol when I wonder how the public image of a warrior became so narrowly male. The courage of women was never absent. For a long time, we simply failed to recognise it in the places where they were already fighting, guarding, rescuing and protecting.

Photographing this breadth of work required permissions and trust across different departments and states. My earlier work with the BSF and Mumbai Police helped. As the series developed, I spoke with Renuka Mishra again. By then she was a senior IPS officer. She understood why it mattered to show women across services together, helped me understand where they worked, and connected me with people along the way. The woman whose authority I had first noticed in Agra had become part of the journey without either of us having planned it.

Then Joint Commissioner of Police for Law and Order Deven Bharti supported a photograph for the tribute to Mumbai Police calendar. I chose the steps of the Asiatic Library. At six one morning, 35 women officers posted across Mumbai assembled there. That one frame brought the scale of their presence into view. It was not an isolated officer standing for the force; it was the force looking back at the city.

Mumbai Police women officers at Asiatic Library

At six in the morning, 35 women officers assembled on the Asiatic Library steps. Together, they made the scale of women’s service in Mumbai Police impossible to overlook.

Around 2016, Rupali Talan began working with me as a photographer. She brought her own vision, warmth and dynamism to Women in Uniform. Sometimes I hesitated to ask for an image in extreme conditions. Rupali understood how far a woman herself was willing to go and built a trust and energy between them that made a forceful photograph possible. She brought a young woman’s perspective to the work, and many of the images we created together carry that connection. Later, much of the photography for our CRPF book Yashasvini would be hers.

Rupali Talan.

Rupali’s connection with the women changed the energy of a shoot. She understood when to encourage, when to step closer, and when to let their own strength fill the frame.

As Vogue India prepared its tenth anniversary edition in 2017, Anaita Shroff Adajania saw a photograph from the series and wanted to know more. She initially offered four pages. I felt the work needed enough space to reveal its range, so I said four pages were too few. Vogue made a bold editorial decision for a premium anniversary issue: a ten-page photo essay devoted to my photographs, followed by a larger online feature that was shared thousands of times. Women from different forces stood together before a readership that might never have encountered their work in this way.

Screenshot of the Vogue India online Women in Uniform feature

The Vogue India online feature.

Read the Vogue India feature online

One of the images that spread most widely did not even show a face. As I was leaving a police training centre in Bihar, I noticed a newly inducted woman in khaki with an AK-47. Mehendi was still visible on the hand holding the weapon. I photographed it in a moment. For me there was no contradiction to resolve. The mehendi was hers. The khaki was hers. The rifle belonged to the profession she had chosen. Khaki, Mehendi and an AK-47 became one of my most viral photographs because that simple frame made people look again at what they thought a woman in uniform could be.

Mehendi on the hand of a woman in khaki holding an AK-47

Khaki, Mehendi and an AK-47.
Mehendi on the hand. An AK-47 in its grip. No face was needed for this photograph to challenge what people imagined a woman in uniform could be.

At other times a face revealed what the public had rarely seen. I photographed IPS officer Rashmi Shukla during her last week as Maharashtra’s Director General of Police for the DG gallery. She was known as a tough officer. The portraits caught an open, smiling side of her, and when she retired they were shared widely. A photograph can reach beyond a reputation and find the human being inside it.

The project’s life has never depended only on magazines or newspapers. Through assignments and goodwill shoots, Rupali and I created photo banks for the services we photographed. Those images have been used for years on their websites, in books, on social media and in their own communication. They give an organisation strong visual material with which to represent the women serving within it. Yashasvini, our coffee table book on CRPF women, was photographed primarily by Rupali Talan; its first copy was presented to the Hon’ble President of India, Smt Droupadi Murmu.

Yashasvini, the book on women of the CRPF.

Pravin Talan's mother holding the Yashasvini coffee table book

My mother holds Yashasvini, our book on the women of the CRPF. Long before this project began, I had seen that same fearlessness in her. She has always been my inspiration.

Women in uniform had been breaking barriers across the services for decades before the Army opened its ranks beyond medical services in 1992. A couple of my college friends joined among the early Army batches. While the country debated women’s place in active combat, women in the central armed police forces were already guarding borders, entering insurgency-hit terrain and facing armed danger. These were not ceremonial roles: they served in operational theatres where their own lives and the lives of others were at stake. Through the years of this series, Rupali and I have been silent witnesses as new policies opened more avenues for women in uniform. Our photographs hold only a part of this journey; many pioneering women and entire organisations remain beyond our archive. We owe much of what we have seen to the women who laid the foundations, often without the recognition they deserved.

We call our homeland Matrubhoomi, our motherland. The word carries its own meaning for me. Protecting a country also means protecting the ordinary lives within it: a child who has gone missing, someone trapped in a fire, a traveller who will never know the vigilance that kept an airport safe, or a village that can sleep because someone else remains awake.

Mumbai Police woman officer smiling with a woman at a street food stall.

At a Mumbai street stall, a police officer and the woman serving food share a smile—a bond of trust infused with a sense of security.

I have never believed that a woman in uniform must be called exceptional simply because she is a woman. Anyone who wears a uniform is expected to be capable, committed to the service and ready when others depend on them. The organisation is bigger than any one person. A decision made under pressure can affect many lives.

But the uniform does not take away the person inside it. The women I have photographed train hard, carry difficult duties and sometimes walk directly towards danger. They also know fear, fatigue, worry and the pull of home. Some want no fame at all. They deserve respect for their service, and dignity, peace and understanding as human beings.

Film has become another way for us to tell these stories. We have already made short films on women in the NSG, India’s elite counter-terror force, released on International Women’s Day, and on women in the CRPF. Yet the extraordinary accounts we have heard and witnessed could never fit into a single photograph or a short film. Rupali and I now intend to develop Women in Uniform into a documentary web series, following women across services through their training, duties and decisions, with their own voices at its heart. There are many stories still to tell, and this is where we want to take the journey next.

She bursts through murky water with her weapon ready. The obstacle has taken away solid ground; it has not taken away her control. This photograph of NSG woman commando was one of the most viral images of the NSG calendar.

NSG woman commando after fire maze training

She has come through the fire maze. Flames still rise behind her, but the weapon remains in her hands and the exercise is not over. NSG commando training is one of the most demanding trainings in the world.

Col Shikha Bhadauria diffuses an IED in a mock drill

Shikha Bhadauria, photographed while serving as a Major in the Indian Army, studies the device during a bomb disposal drill. Her gaze is fixed and every movement deliberate; in a live operation, a fraction of a second can matter.