Destabilising beauty: In a book of Tarun Bhartiya’s images, a quest for freedom

Em. A simple yet defining act. Like Rosa Parks, whose simple act of refusing to ride in the segregated section of the bus in the US South became a powerful catalyst for change in the struggle against racism, Spillity Lyngdoh Langrin’s “em” (meaning no) became the rallying cry against uranium mining in the Khasi hills of Meghalaya.

In 1993, the 90-year-old matriarch refused the inducements of the Uranium Corporation of India of Rs 45 crores for a 30-year-lease to mine on her land. She became the emblem, not just for the anti-mining protests that began in 2007 but the inspiration for protests in 2021 against the dam to be built across the Umngot river.

For prolific documentary maker, photographer, Hindi poet and activist Tarun Bhartiya, Spillity became the fulcrum for his explorations on juste resistante – the ways of resistance. He made several journeys into Domiasiat to document these struggles.

His reflections on refusals were encapsulated in powerful images, bits of poetry and laconic prose. Some of the material was exhibited in Ahmedabad by the Navjivan Trust in December 2024, just a few weeks before he suddenly passed away.

At the end of 2025, his partner and comrade Angela Rangad along with his close friends Sanjay Kak, Tanvi Mishra, Itu Chaudhuri, Caldwell Manners and others completed Em No Nahi, a photo book of this work.

It is a fitting tribute to the man, who had told me before the Ahmedabad exhibition, “Image-making for me normally doesn’t start with big questions or ideas or events but as private curiosity…wanting to know more, make friends, gossip or even participate in resistance movements… It’s mostly this.”

The book is in both Khasi and English and includes a booklet titled A Very Short Guide to Uranium Mining and Nuclear Power.

In the poignant afterword, Rangad speaks of Bhartiya’s attempts to understand a new cultural unknown, right from the time when he as a nine-year-old from Bihar came to Meghalaya, where his father was teaching at the North Eastern University. A dkhar or outsider, he sought out solidarity.

“I am also Bah Tarun,” he would say, using the Khasi word that means big brother. Friendships and conversations, he believed, are a better way to think about a place than the idea of belonging.

It is these deep engagements with the people of Meghalaya – union workers, protesters, farmers, pastors – that form the matrix of his image building, as does an affinity for the landscape, with evocative skyscapes and clouds. Elements that could have exoticised the vibrant culture of the North East become, instead, an integral part of the story.

A deep sense of community and the notion that land is not merely a factor of production but exists palpably in the imagination as an Eden to live in are manifested in Bhartiya’s images. That is evident in pictures ranging from that of a village elder in his traditional hat smoking a pipe and the blurred, grainy captures of people wearing basket-like bamboo knups to protect them from the rain as they make their way to Mynsang on a wet morning to protest against the destruction of Umngot.

The book begins with the section titled Death House. Here are those who have come to mourn the death of Spillity. Old and young faces gather under a cross. Another image of an array of slippers and weathered feet speaks of workers and those who toil on the land. Then there are coffin bearers and solemn-faced children participating in the funeral with flowers and wreaths. There is also the pig being roasted that will form part of the ritual meal at the end of rites.

Rangad writes that Bhartiya, who had begun making trips to Domiasiat to document the protest by the Khasi Students Union and other Khasi youth groups, made friends with the participants. This immersive experience is obvious not just in images of demonstrations but also of wedding celebrations, the voting in an election and other gatherings.

The section remembering Bhartiya’s initial journey to meet with Kong Spillity in a rickety bus, an eight-hour journey from Shillong and then an hour’s walk, has a dramatic build up with the perfect curation of compelling images and terse writing. Here was a woman, we are told, who is reputed to be obstinate, unyielding. Why had she refused the offer of the Uranium Corporation of India?

She did not answer, writes Bhartiya, but instead led him to a clump of forest, a waterfall and pool. “Could the money buy this river, this land? This freedom?”

She looks on with defiance.

And then when we turn the page we finally see her. Shot at an angle in which she is standing tall with a furrowed face and white hair, she cuts an imposing picture.

The meaning of her freedom will be weighed up over the next section, when Bhartiya narrates with some glee of how he conned his way into being part of an exposure trip by the Uranium Corporation to Jadugoda in Jharkhand to counter the anti-mining stir.

A technocrat expounds on displacement and development. People will get houses, salaried employment. They will become “reachable”, he says. They will know the value of their land. As Bhartiya sums it up: “Kong Spillity and he had both talked freedom.”

A short but succinct sentence it is the crux of Bhartiya’s deeply felt politics and the complex issues he grappled with for years. Questions about the Constituent Assembly, the making of India, the Sixth Schedule that gives tribal areas a degree of autonomy, the burden of having natural resources and what comprises development (and anti-development).

In a brief chat with me before he died, he had explained some of this. He spoke of why and how many people’s movements in the North East were wary of modes of participation by which the states attempts to make offers to indigenous people living on land under which lie rich resources. Tribal communities, he said, found that such engagements weighed heavily against them.

Spillity’s em was a refusal to participate in such “democratic dialogue”. In doing so she bequeathed a legacy of protest to her people.

The inspiration of hope was invoked by the young woman Kong M, who hoisted her daughter on her back and went for an anti-dam rally in 2022 at Mynsang singing songs to the Umngot river. She herself had joined in the anti-uranium mining protests as a 10-year-old.

The book reverberates with the synergy of the poetic and political. There are several pictures of the beauty of the land but also how it has been scarred. The shanty towns where mining has taken place or the irony of rubble and a cement plaque stating “Donated by Uranium Corporation of India. Limited work by PL.”

Bhartiya had told me how the “challenge is not so much in the making of the images but the politics and history they have to carry. My struggle has always been that. I care about the aesthetic and technique but want not to get lost in that like some art photographer. That’s why I take so bloody long to think through the images, see their reception amongst the people, destabilise their beauty.”

The intention to unsettle is taken further with stirring shots of actual protests at Mynsang. A cross section of participants with posters as seen from the windscreen of a jeep.

This is solidarity being expressed in a society where the state and political leaders have engineered breakaways and splintered youth and community groups while peddling the “development” agenda.

Rangad tells us that for now the uranium still remains under the ground. The dam project has been stalled. But. she asks, for how long? Citizens have to be ready to “resurrect the ode and the movement”.

The conversation has started, she notes, adding,“Tarun will always be part of it.”

Freny Manecksha is a journalist in Mumbai.

Em, No, Nahi, photographs and text by Tarun Bhartiya, Yaarbal Books.