Back in the Picture

They were lying forgotten in crates for over a quarter of a century 8212; the negatives that Kulwant Roy, an Associated Press photographer, had carefully dispatched to Aditya Arya over the years, the last batch reaching Arya just before Roy8217;s death in 1984. Now, they are out of the boxes and on the walls of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. And they are delightful images from the past 8212; Mahatma Gandhi gesturing to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who almost looks exasperated; Gandhi collecting money for the Harijan Welfare Fund in Delhi sometime in the early 1940s; Jawaharlal Nehru clutching a cricket bat in one picture and playing Holi at Teen Murti Bhavan in another, and Sardar Patel arriving at the 1945 Simla Conference in a hand-drawn tonga as Nehru and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan walk beside. The personal delightfully merges with the political in them.

These are just a few of the 100 black-and-white images that Arya, a Delhi-based photographer and a family friend of Roy, has selected and digitised.

8220;The agenda of the time was to create an iconography of the important people,8221; says Sabeena Gadihoke, who has curated the exhibition 8220;History in the Picture8221;.

Alongside the heroes, there are also pictures of the nameless multitude, like the workers building the Bhakra Nangal Dam, the temple of Nehruvian India.

Arya, 48, says it would take a couple of years to digitise and restore all the pictures. Unfortunately, many are lost for ever. When Roy was travelling across the world in the 1960s, he put his pictures in boxes and mailed them to his Delhi address. None of them reached. Roy searched the post offices and garbage dumps of Delhi, but never found them.

The exhibition 8220;History in the Making8221; is on at the Indira Gandhi Center for the Arts till October 21