Rarely does the word brilliant fall short for an exceptional artist. For Raghu Rai, it does. His eyes were a camera and the camera held his gaze and blinked exactly to his command. Browsing through his photographs, viewers are more than stunned by his timing, his eye, and his presence in places were life was aching to be discovered and caught in the stillness of motion.
A protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raghu Rai worked as a photographer-journalist in The Statesman and India Today. His images appeared in scores of other publications around the world. He covered the Bangladesh war of 1971 and the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, among other events.
Rai’s most memorable projects keep probing the question of calamity – natural, historical and political. He was a keen observer of the destitution of human life faced by displacement and the disappearance of destination. The camera frames and reframes the question of survival, where you are left with something more than agony and empathy.
Rai’s images of the Bhopal tragedy are surreal: they focus on empty eyes and gazes that do not look at us and prevent us from looking at them. They are caught in their own time that separates us from them.
They ask a question: how do you connect to epic suffering? You forget the camera and think of yourself: with what lens will you see faces that have left us with an enormous silence of their expressions? They are not speaking to us. But they provoke us to speak to ourselves.
Even when the odd pair of eyes in the images meets our gaze, you can feel they do not look at us. They look at the empty face of fleeting time. Those eyes appear shocked by time. In these images, you feel time itself has fled the scene and left behind bodies to wonder what it was, or is, to live.
In Rai’s images, the gaze is always gazing back at you, probingly. I’m reminded of Spanish poet Antonio Machado’s lines from Proverbs and Songs: “The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.”
In Rai’s images of the Bangladesh War, you revisit Partition. It was Bangladesh’s double tragedy. Image after image tells you, history has no mercy. It is a machine with repetitive compulsion. War is not simply about how it kills, but how it uproots and displaces.
War sticks to the eyes of survivors like a still lizard on the wall. Wartorn bodies are also in movement, walking to live. Their bodies are straight, or bent, and their unknown destination is their destiny. War often turns bodies into a single, extended body of people huddled together on the top of a bus, or in a train, fleeing for safety.
Ironically, you notice in Rai’s images, that the most harrowed faces carry proof of the beastly face of war. War has no face, but it sticks to the faces of its survivors like poisoned glue. You realise through Rai’s images that war is a lived memory of the body, and that survival is beyond instinct. Misery does not obliterate what is precious: food, cloth, child and umbrella.
Imagine having to deal with hunger and fear together, with no idea where to go. War returns people to the original condition of belonging to the inhospitable earth. A nation is a home bound by territory. Refugees experience the cruelty of that paradox.
Rai had an eye for bodies that were oblivious of time, either in joy, or suffering. He was a keen observer of strategies of survival. In Rai’s images, you realize the thin veneer of order, as something or the other is always falling apart.
A poor man and his wife push a cartwheel full of heavy boxes piled up on each other. They must keep pushing it till they reach their destination. The cartwheel must be as precariously balanced and moving as their bodies. The machine is the extended body of labour.
Great artists always leave you with something more in their work, where curiosity doesn’t die. It keeps alive our larger curiosity for the world and people, despite all the provocations and limitations against it. Raghu Rai’s art is a testament of what we have lost, but will never lose.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence.
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