How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition
In the dark, predawn hours of December 3, 1984, a dense cloud of poisonous gas leaked from a pesticide plant and, borne on a soft, northern wind, enveloped Bhopal, a city in central India. It was wedding season, and the first night of the Ijtema, an annual gathering that had drawn thousands of Muslim pilgrims to the city. Celebrations were in full swing as the cloud descended on the metropolis in a thick, deadly fog that, owing to the presence of hydrogen cyanide, smelled of bitter almonds. Within minutes, revellers were gasping for breath; their nostrils quivered, their lips turned blue. Some ran from the fog, quickly depleting their last reserves of oxygen, and started to gulp lungfuls of toxic air. Others collapsed instantly. By the time the sun rose over the city, roughly three thousand people had died.
More than four decades later, the Bhopal gas tragedy remains the deadliest industrial disaster in human history. Researchers estimate that half a million people are still suffering long-term health consequences, including cases in which their lungs were permanently scarred by the chemicals, or irreversible damage to their legs left them unable to walk. The morning after the leak, toxins still hanging in the air, Raghu Rai, a photojournalist from Delhi, arrived in the city to document the aftermath of the disaster. Amid the chaos, Rai found a father burying his infant child, no more than a year or two old, in the shallow dirt. Rai approached with his camera, bent down, and snapped a closeup shot of the corpse, half covered in soil. The child’s eyes were swollen and milky, their mouth agape in a silent moan. At the top of the frame is the father’s veiny hand, tenderly brushing rubble away from the infant’s forehead.
That picture, “Burial of an Unknown Child,” became the defining image of the disaster, a depiction of tragedy so viscerally infused with loss that, even today, it appears on banners protesting the chemical company responsible, which has yet to make full amends for the incident. “Burial” is one of dozens of photos that Rai, who passed away last month, at the age of eighty-three, selected for his 2015 book “Picturing Time,” a kaleidoscopic compendium of work that spans fifty years and chronicles modern India through its formative decades, as it grappled with newfound statehood and the volatile forces of breakneck modernization.
Rai was born in 1942, and began his career as a photojournalist in his twenties, at the Hindustan Times, an English-language broadsheet. He then bounced around other publications before becoming, in the early eighties, a photo editor at India Today, the most widely circulated magazine in the country. By then, he’d already joined Magnum, the prestigious international photography coöperative, at the invitation of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern street photography, who had come across Rai’s work in Paris’s Gallery Delpire. Rai worked at India Today for about ten years, shooting luminaries such as Mother Teresa, the director Satyajit Ray, and the Dalai Lama, who remained a friend for decades. Eventually, he set out as a freelancer, embarking on trips from the snowy Himalayan territory of Ladakh, on India’s northern border, to Kanyakumari, the coastal town at the southern tip of the subcontinent. As India took its place on the world stage, developing nuclear capabilities and harnessing its exploding population, as it lost one Prime Minister to a heart attack and the next to assassination, as it suffered bout after bout of sectarian violence, Rai was there. His was the lens through which so much of the world—and so many Indians themselves—came to view and understand the nation.
Despite the documentary nature of his work, Rai’s practice, as he writes in “Picturing Time,” was rooted in the “divine concept of darshan,” or “a complete awareness” of “the reality of a place, a person, the physical and the inner aura, reflected in its entirety.” He believed that “some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected,” and understood that a good photo unfolds like a dream: initially, the lightning-bolt shock of aesthetic confrontation, and later the remembrance—memory-images persisting long after the page is turned, the book put away, the subject of the picture itself long forgotten. One of his most famous shots, “Chaiwala, Delhi–Mumbai train,” captures the titular tea-seller hanging out the side of a railcar as it passes through the Indian countryside. The photo shows a dizzying contrast between stillness and motion: the left side of the frame, a blurred-out wash of brush and grassland, gives way to the chaiwala himself, his mop of hair waving in the wind, his tray of teaware impossibly balanced in the hazy light. Behind him is the spindly figure of a man astride a bicycle, standing before skeletal, half-visible trees. The photo initially presents as a character study—the chaiwala and his inquisitive gaze dominating the frame—but then you see the cyclist, and a wall of fog in the distance, and the portrait takes on an allegorical quality, the murky path ahead an uncertain destiny.
Other shots in “Picturing Time” showcase Rai’s uncanny prescience into India’s turbulent future. “Back in Power,” from 1980, depicts a smiling Indira Gandhi, who has just reclaimed her post as Prime Minister, greeting an adoring crowd, a heap of garlands in her left hand, her right palm outstretched for yet one more. “Ironically,” Rai writes in the book, “the bulk of the people garlanding her are from the Sikh community.” Four years after the photo was taken, Gandhi would authorize a devastating attack on the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site. The same sense of looming violence is tangible in “Ayodhya,” from 1992, which features a jolly man strolling through the city in an overcoat, a monkey perched on a wall above his left shoulder. The day after this photo was taken, a Hindu-nationalist mob destroyed the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque, leading to a nationwide wave of riots that resulted in the murder of thousands of Indians, Muslim and Hindu.
Though Rai’s body of work can be viewed as a transportive archive, an intimate visual history distilled through his keen eye for storytelling, its power comes chiefly from that sense of “darshan.” “Picturing Time” spans decades of accelerated and tumultuous change, but many of its shots act as self-contained worlds, mise en scènes so wholly immersive that they capture not only timelessness but a deep-seated sense of the sublime, found in the quiet rituals of evening prayer, or a dead child’s glassy eyes.
My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future.
