TRIBUTE

The colours of India

Raghubir Singh, 1942-1999.

RAM RAHMAN

THE sudden death of Raghubir Singh in New York on April 18 has robbed the world of Indian photography and art of one of its most vibrant and provocative talents. A huge retrospective exhibition of Raghubir Singh's works, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, was only recently at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and in Mumbai. The large-format book which accompanied the exhibition, River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh, turned out to be his last in a series of books which he began publishing in the 1970s.

Raghubir was from Jaipur and studied at St. Xavier's there. He wrote about the influence of his mother, a devout Hindu, and how his observation of her faith and rituals gave him an understanding of the power of the religious imagination in the life of the ordinary Indian. Rajasthan, its feudal culture and particularly its colours, were a formative factor in his future engagement with India, expressed through his lens.

COURTESY: T. NARAYAN / OUTLOOK

Raghubir took to photography even as a student at Hindu College at Delhi University in the mid-1960s, when he started doing photo features for Life, The New York Times and some British publications. Calcutta proved to be a turning point for him. He met R.P. Gupta there and, through him, Satyajit Ray and his contemporaries. Ray's cinematic vision and his development of a contemporary narrative form for modern India became a model and an inspiration for Raghubir's own work as a still photographer. Calcutta and its intellectual life was the start of his cultural and artistic education. At about the same time, he shot pictures in Jaipur for a catalogue of Indian artefacts for Stuart Cary Welch, the scholar on Mughal painting from Boston. This friendship opened a window to the world of Indian art history and Cary's students - Milo Beach (who is now at the Smithsonian Institution), Glenn Lowry (now director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and Clark Worswick, who researched and published The Last Empire (1976) on 19th century photography in India - would prove important to Raghubir's artistic development in later years. He was that rare photographer who became deeply interested in art history and sought to educate himself in both Western and Asian art, and the history of photography. He could argue as easily about the merits and style of the Mughal painters Mansur and Basawan as about those of the 19th century photographers in India, Linnaes Tripe and Felice Beato.

Raghubir's first two books of colour photographs, Calcutta and Ganges, came out in the early 1970s. These were among the first of the so-called 'coffee-table' books in India, and indeed were almost the only books of Indian photographs that were then available. It was in Calcutta that he met William Gedney, an American photographer and teacher from New York who introduced Raghubir to the school of New York street photography. This style evolved from the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, and had developed a sophisticated visual vocabulary in the work of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, amongst others, in the 1960s. Through their work, Raghubir learned that a photographer could document the ordinary world in its everyday ordinariness, without resorting to the dramatic themes and styles of photojournalism. He learned that one could assemble a series of photographs as a visual narrative with an almost literary quality - a novel with images, not words. His personal friendships within this brotherhood - with Lee Friedlander, Thomas Roma, Geoff Winning-ham and many others - were very important to him. Through them, their students and his own recent teaching in the School of Visual Art in New York, Raghubir had become an important part of the most lively photographic community and city anywhere.

Raghubir's own work started reflecting this change with Rajasthan (1974). The big innovation he made was in understanding the lessons of the 'street' aesthetic - 35-mm camera with a fixed wide-angle lens, quick, almost snapshot-style shooting, using the full frame but applying it to colour. He was also very consciously aware of adapting these lessons to an Indian culture. Raghubir's was the striving of so much contemporary creative work in India - taking the lessons of modernism and internalising them to create a truly contemporary artistic truth. The Ganga and, more recently, the Grand Trunk Road, became the metaphors for journeys - a grand vision of North India. An unpublished work on the Ambassador car, which carries this metaphor across the whole of India, was in a sense a completion of a trilogy. Certainly no other photographer has so single-mindedly pursued a path which really parallels his. Raghubir was the envy of many of his Western contemporaries because of his amazing output of books showcasing his work. This was his way of placing his work in the public realm, both in India and the West, and I personally know the incredible struggle and effort which went into publishing each of these books. The strategy he used was in positioning these books for the tourist market, yet the artistic vision behind them was totally uncompromising. No other artist has been able to put so much of his or her work out into the public realm. And behind each of these books lay hours of obsessive research into political and cultural history.

COURTESY: T. NARAYAN / OUTLOOK
Chief Minister Jyoti Basu addresses a meeting in Calcutta.

Raghubir controlled the entire production process - editing, proofing and finally overseeing the final output. This was part of his artistic discipline. He also saw himself as part of the tradition of the writers who wrote in these books - Satyajit Ray, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan. Obsessive about sharing his work with the younger generation, he was also very generous with sharing his enthusiasm, friendships, contacts and knowledge. While I have lost a great friend, the Indian art world has lost a phenomenal talent. As Raghu Rai said at a memorial meeting at the NGMA in Delhi, Raghubir was a figure who inevitably stirred up the small pond which was Indian photography, and his work was truly a vision of the India he lived in.