Between Black and White

Raghu Rai captures the scatological and the sacred of this wide-angled land

It is the sort of picture you could skip in a wedding album 8212; a clumsy photo of the newlyweds, with the bride8217;s face turned away from the camera. But flip back to the page, and you might notice the anguish in that half-averted face. It8217;s the anguish of every girl leaving the familiar for the unknown 8212; alone. Yet no one else in the photograph seems to share the young woman8217;s sorrow. Her mother is looking away, distracted by a guest, the groom is marching manfully on, heedless of this new companion clutching timidly at his shawl, and the thronging relatives are all wrapped up in their private worlds.

If a good picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, then each of Raghu Rai8217;s photographs is a novella that is at once timeless and contemporary, personal and impersonal, as raw as meat in a butcher shop, and as subtle as haiku poetry.

Maybe that8217;s why Rai8217;s challenge has always been India, a country that simply defies description. A country so wide-angled and so overwhelmingly visual that extracting its essence is like distilling a tonne of gently rotting roses into a teaspoon. This time, he has done it with characteristic uniqueness 8212; black-and-white images of our Technicolor nation, in a lavish tome called Raghu Rai8217;s India.

And if the title sounds vaguely conceited or proprietary, I think, they are liberties he has earned. One of the world8217;s most talented photographers according to none other than Henri Cartier-Bresson, this man nevertheless believes the photographer8217;s job is purely functional: 8220;To cut out a frame-sized slice from the world around him, so faithfully and honestly, that were he to put it back, life and the world would begin to move again without a stumble.8221;

Indeed, most of Raghu Rai8217;s characters 8212; human, animal and avian 8212; seem to wander into his photographs quite by accident, lives momentarily captured in parenthesis, before they seamlessly head out. Part of the whole, yet providing a subtext that not only enriches the story but also sends it scurrying in different directions, like a wayward delta burrowing through layers of fertile silt and labyrinthine marsh.

Yet Rai8217;s work is not about technique, nor about pictures, words, thoughts or stories. It is, ultimately, a journey into the human spirit, as you can plainly see in 8220;Rush For A Local Train8221; Mumbai, 1996 above. On either side of the frame is a blur of sprinting figures, life bound by the spatial and temporal. In the middle of this cosmic chaos, like a tranquil island, sit three oblivious commuters in sharp focus, quietly reading the morning papers. Here only the Present prevails, the reality of the moment.
The problem with turning photography to philosophy is obvious: a realisation that it is not the filters in the camera, but those in the mind that pose the biggest threat to 8220;faithfulness and honesty8221;.

In 8220;Women at Banganga8221; Kalighat, Kolkata, 2005, a group of women lovingly worships a stone deity surrounded by mounds of rotting refuse and urban decay. The contrast is commonplace, almost stereotypical, yet with Rai, goddess and garbage, the sacred and the scatological somehow manage to transcend their mundane duality.

Story continues below this ad

The trick, you see, is to simply reflect reality like a mirror, and resist that very human urge to judge or interpret. Because photography at its best, says Raghu Rai, is like the soul: it need not always be explained.