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Journalism of Courage
When photographer and activist Ram Rahman learned of a trove of Sunil Janah’s prints lurking in Noida, he was sceptical. He knew Janah and his work well and had curated his exhibition Photographing India 1939-1972 in New York City. But in his introduction to Sunil Janah: Photographs 1940-1960, a collection of vintage gelatin-silver prints, he recounts his amazement as he walked into the Swaraj Art Archive and encountered a photograph of a smiling young woman idly turning the propeller of a Vickers Viscount painted in the livery of Scandinavian Airlines. It was one of those scale models which used to grace the desks of travel agents when flying signified romance rather than the possibility of cavity searches, and the image speaks the language of publicity stills from the ’50s or ’60s. Rahman was amazed because the woman is his mother, Indrani Rahman. Though he knew all of Janah’s work, collected in his home in Berkeley, he had not seen this picture ever before.
This portrait is among the new images in Rahman’s Sunil Janah: Photographs 1940-1960, a 190-page unpriced volume which documents an exhibition of the Swaraj Art Archive. Perhaps for the first time, it presents Janah’s black-and-white photography as he had wanted it to be seen — in colour. His best work dates from the mid-20th century, when printmaking and finishing were integral to the photographer’s art, when “dodge and burn” meant five-finger magic made in thin air, not the much-abused Photoshop tool. Apart from the grain of the film, the final look of a print depended on the paper used and the cast it acquired over time, a tint between warm red and cool green.
Because Janah was a black-and-white photographer, and because black-and-white printing is much cheaper than colour, his books — including the last, OUP’s Photographing India (2013) — were printed in black and white. But now, we can see his prints in their original colours, and the mineral richness of four-colour black too — black as it is seen in nature, saturated with all the other colours.
There are no pictures of the Bengal famine, which Janah covered for the Communist Party’s publications and won international acclaim. No political portraiture, either, but his other fascinations are all here, ranging from industrial photography in the “temples of modern India” to tribal life. Janah’s work featured an extraordinary number of topless women, from the Malabar coast to the Santhal Parganas. Did he seek out certain communities or, even after Independence, did large swathes of India dress like the ancients, in a single unstitched cloth? Or are the two questions identical?
Most fascinating of these women is the “Girl from Malappuram” from The Second Creature (1948), whose poise recalls the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro. The soldier and archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler’s description of his favourite prehistoric statuette could equally apply to this unknown girl from Kerala: “She’s about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There’s nothing like her, I think, in the world.” Not altogether true. Five thousand years later, Sunil Janah found her artistic inheritor at the southern tip of India.
The story appeared in print with the headline Photo Synthesis
