Through the Lens,Darkly

Between 1942 and 1945,the Bengal famine,combined by the apathy of the British rulers,left more than two million dead. This prompted Sunil Janah,a young graduate from Kolkata’s prestigious Presidency College and a photography enthusiast,to shoot the stark images of the region. He accompanied PC Joshi,general secretary of Communist Party of India,and traveled across Bengal with his camera. The images,published in the Communist press,got him noticed all over India and soon Janah became a full-time party member. He went on to photograph various facets of the freedom struggle,from the leaders to the peasant and workers’ movement.

On November 7,Delhi-based photographer Ram Rahman will retrace Janah’s journey in an illustrated lecture at Teen Murti auditorium. There are more than 500 photographs,shot between 1939 and 1971. “He has an unusual range of work,varying from political photographs to industrial images,from pictures of actors and dancers to those of tribals. The photo lecture will bring together this large corpus of work to reflect the period,” says Rahman. There are images of a smiling Mahatma Gandhi and MA Jinnah during the landmark 1944 meeting,where the two leaders discussed the possibility of a Hindu-Muslim accord,as well as tea pickers in Darjeeling hills,and tribals from the Nilgiri and the Northeast.

Some of the photographs have been a part of a retrospective of Janah curated by Rahman in New York in 1998. Based in Berkeley,California,now,Janah will not be present for the lecture. His pictures will tell the story.

The lecture will take place at Teen Murti Auditorium on Saturday at 4.30 pm.
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