Born four decades after the 1947 Partition of India into what eventually became three nations, Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick, 36, has been documenting the fragments of "united" British India—homes, inheritance, transport—that remain in today's Bangladesh. His canvas in this project is the rail system that left the British Empire's lasting mark on the part of India that was first known as East Bengal, before becoming East Pakistan in 1947, and finally Bangladesh in 1971.

Protick’s photographs have emptied the space of people; what we see instead are skeletal train tracks and the traces of commerce, habitation, manufacturing, and entertainment that grew up around this architecture of connectivity. There are occasional human figures—a nurse, an entertainer, a mystic—but those people carry an