New Delhi: Renowned photojournalist Raghu Rai, whose camera captured every shade of India's chaotic yet riveting journey as a nation with empathy and nuance for over five decades, and who became a lodestar to a generation of photographers both at home and abroad, passed away at a hospital on Sunday. He was 83.
"He had been suffering from cancer. But his condition worsened in the past couple of weeks," his assistant Amit Chauhan said.
Sometimes a solitary frame by Rai could speak more than 10,000 words. His stark black and white photograph, "Burial of a Child," became one of the most haunting images of the 1984 Bhopal Gas tragedy. His work during the 1971 Indo-Pak war and the consequent refugee crisis were published, among others, by New York Times and Le Monde, and became the lens through which many in the West saw the conflict. His 1969 snapshot of a bunch of Congress politicians, all males, standing around a table while Indira Gandhi, the only woman in the frame, is seated, was an eloquent commentary on how power can trump gender.
Rai's frames also recorded the song of struggling India. Washermen, wrestlers, construction workers, cart pullers – Rai didn't just see them; he heard them and created space for them. A 1985 photo, where a mother is relaying her younger child to his elder brother through a window with the Taj Mahal in the background, privileges the ordinary living people over the visually extraordinary. It's not just a frame, but an entire way of looking. Another photograph, a cart loaded with cartons being pushed by a woman and pulled by her husband on the streets of 1976 Delhi, stayed indelibly with filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Rai recounted in one of his books. The photojournalist followed the cart for half a kilometer before finding the perfect frame.
Noted photographer Sondeep Shankar says Rai could create magic from the mundane. "He was the master of the human moment much like the peerless French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. His Bangladesh war pictures too had the human touch. They are quite unlike what was war photography then," he says.
Rai was also a master of portraits as evident in his series on the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa. The camera in these pictures seems to look beyond the body, rather quietly peeping into their souls. The lensman equated the craft to the divine concept of "darshan," which to him was experiencing a place or a person's "inner aura reflected in its entirety."
Rai was born in Jhang in what is now Pakistan's Punjab province in 1942. A civil engineer by training, he got attracted to the craft in his mid-20s. His elder brother, S Paul, and Kishore Parekh, both first-rate photographers, inspired him.
His big break came after he visited a friend's farm about 50 kilometers from Delhi carrying an Agfa Super Silette camera lent by his brother. In the village, a baby donkey caught his eye. But the beast was camera-shy. Rai chased the donkey through the village streets much to the amusement of village boys before snapping pictures of the tired animal. From all the photos of the trip, his brother selected the donkey's and sent it to The Times in London. The newspaper would publish an off-beat photo over half a page every weekend those days. Rai's unusual snap found a place. "That was the beginning of my journey as a photographer," he wrote in the introduction of the book "Picturing Time," a collection of his finest work.
Rai's first exhibition happened in 1969. Three years later, after seeing his one-man show at Paris' gallery Delpire in 1972, the peerless Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated him to Magnum Photos, the celebrated global photo cooperative.
He started his journalistic career working for The Statesman. Later he excelled at India Today, where one of his photo features on the bonding between a blind beggar and a mentally challenged girl from different religious communities in Baroda remains a remarkable piece of photojournalism. "Life's longing for itself – it is what I feel my photographs should reflect," he once wrote.
Over the decades, Rai became a legend and an institution in his lifetime. "He was an inspirational figure for lensmen both in India and abroad," says Shankar.
Just like Satyajit Ray in films, Ravi Shankar in classical music and Sachin Tendulkar in cricket are recognized as icons of excellence in their respective fields, so was Rai, the foremost photographer of his generation. He is probably the only Indian photographer whose name prompts recall even in small town or mofussil India.
Rai's death was widely mourned on social media. The last rites were performed at Lodhi Road cremation ground.
