CHENNAI: India, that jewel in the vast British colonial crown, has always been the muse of photographers from around the world, smitten as they were by her dusky beauty and dusty landscape. They framed images of rustic life, cows, dreadlocked sadhus, the unwashed masses, and snake charmers – all of which added up to picture postcards with quaint beauty, at least for the most part of it.
To their midst came a man who sought to show the deeper voice through his images. Where others saw subjects, he saw souls. For Raghu Rai, the camera was his religion; and as he once said, through the camera he met god.
Rai, the master who moulded the mundane into art but without attempting to embellish it with the surreal, died at a private hospital in New Delhi in the early hours of Sunday. He was 83. He is survived by wife Gurmeet, son Nitin, and daughters Lagan, Avani, and Purvai.
Rai received the Padma Shri in 1972 for his coverage of the Bangladesh war and its aftermath, apart from several national and international awards.
He received the Photographer of the Year award in the United States for his photo essay "Human Management of Wildlife in India", published in National Geographic.
The French government conferred him with the Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.
Born on December 18, 1942, in Jhang, now in the Punjab province of Pakistan, Rai was qualified as a civil engineer. He joined the Indian army as an engineer and took part in the operation to liberate Goa from the Portuguese. But when he was 23, Rai took up photography, reportedly after being inspired by his elder brother S Paul, and joined The Statesman newspaper a year later in 1966.
A few years later, after coming across Rai’s work at an exhibition in Paris in 1971, French master Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated him to join Magnum Photos in 1977. Over the course of his professional career, Rai has worked with the Sunday magazine and India Today among others, during which he taught India the beauty and nuances of photo essays.
In 1984, Rai captured the image of the half-buried body of an infant who was killed by the noxious gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. That photograph spoke a thousand words, in languages and dialects spoken around the world, conveying the horrors of the Bhopal gas tragedy. For the West, it could no longer be forgotten as an unfortunate accident.
Rai’s lens saw Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Satyajit Ray, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Bismillah Khan, among others. It also saw the nameless people on the ghats of Ganga and Yamuna, the workers engrossed in their livelihood, the commuters rushing along railway platforms, and drifters without a care for the world. What the lens showed us were vignettes of people, animals, and objects in their own candid selves, while the camera and the man behind it were seemingly invisible onlookers.
Rai showed the soul of India without caricaturing it as a land of mystics and mythology. His photos captured the heart of a land and us, the masses, who call it home.