FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER, what sets apart a war zone
from other locations is the imminence of danger. Raghu Rai had gone along with
the first column of Indian troops entering what was still officially East
Pakistan from the Khulna
border in early December 1971. Pakistani forces had retreated to defend the
capital, Dacca,
as it was then known. But after they had travelled about 50 km, Pakistanis
attacked with artillery fire. Rai shot photographs of wounded soldiers being
taken away. After the situation subsided, Rai was relieved to find a teashop
and decided to have a moment’s respite, although the Indian army major told him
to be careful. Just as Rai ordered tea and biscuits, a bullet whizzed past him.
“The major shouted for me to lie down,” Rai wrote. “I did, and another bullet
went past me. I crawled back to the shop and was told by the shopkeeper that
the Pakistani army was on the other side of the railtrack, just half a
kilometer away.”
Photographers are meant to be impartial observers, or
witnesses. But to the Pakistani sniper, Rai was a participant, entering enemy
territory, accompanied by a foreign army. He was a target, fair game. He may
have come to record, but he was intervening.
The photographs Rai took
during that two-week war, when the Indian army marched to what is now Dhaka and
defeated General AAK Niazi’s Pakistani army, are now published in a glossy
volume by Niyogi Books, one which commemorates Bangladeshi bravery, and Indian
support and generosity, and documents the Pakistani army’s brutality towards
civilians.
Having stored away the
images for safekeeping, Rai seemed to have forgotten their whereabouts. Two
years ago, he excitedly called his friend Shahidul Alam, the gifted Bangladeshi
photographer, to say that the lost negatives had been found. This was a huge
discovery; Bangladesh
was turning 40 in 2011, and the generation that fought for its freedom was
fading. Alam, who has made it the mission of his life to document the
Bangladeshi saga in all its manifestations by promoting visual culture through
his agency, Drik, was himself compiling the works of photographers from
Bangladesh and abroad for the book he published in 2011, The Birth
Pangs of A Nation. That book includes some of Rai’s photographs and
went on to win an Asia Publishing Award last year. (I wrote the sole essay in
that book.)
Meanwhile, Rai put together
his own collection, with Alam writing its introduction. The Bengal Gallery in Dhaka exhibited Rai’s photographs last December, exposing
a new generation of Bangladeshis to the pain their parents’ generation had
endured. I went to see the exhibition with a Bangladeshi friend. Many young
Bangladeshis paused for a long time before certain images, some taking pictures
on their cellphones; for many young visitors, this was their first exposure to
the horrors of that war, because for long periods of the past four decades, the
country has been ruled by governments that were lukewarm about independence,
with coalition partners who had once been hostile to the idea of freedom from
Pakistan.
One of Rai’s most telling
images was of a mother unable to feed her child because her breast was
emaciated. You could count her, and her child’s, ribs. Looking at that
photograph, two teenage boys started giggling, as if they had never seen
nipples before. Seeing them leer as though the image was vulgar, evoking what
could be read as bibhatsa (disgust) in the place of karuna (compassion) or krodha(anger),
it was apparent why Bangladesh
needs to reclaim its history, and why works like Rai’s photographs matter. The
war was fought over four decades ago, and Bangladesh has just got around to
prosecuting some leaders accused of having committed war crimes. The
International Crimes Tribunal is meant to bring the accused to justice, but it
also has the purpose of educating the generation that has grown up since the
war, about what really happened at that time. For many, the knowledge of the
Liberation War comes from stories shared within the family, but for millions of
other Bangladeshis, Rai’s photographs can contribute to the growing need for
information and understanding about the events of 1971.
Rai’s photographs are now
published in a volume, Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom, a 116-page book with 91
photographs, with the introduction by Alam and short texts by Rai describing
his two assignments during the war. Rai first went in August to document the
stories of refugees, and then again in December, with the Indian army. Those
two journeys are distinct—one tells the story of a human tragedy; the other of
human conquest, culminating in the Pakistani army’s surrender to Indian forces
and Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s triumphant return in
1972.
RAGHU RAI is an elder statesman of
Indian photography. Mentored by the legendary Henri Cartier Bresson in 1977,
after he joined the elite agency Magnum, Rai is known for his astonishingly
intense images, for capturing the essence of drama in people’s lives, finding exceptional
stories in that fraction of a second where he spots something extraordinary
that the normal eye might miss. Two stand out for me: the day after Indira
Gandhi declared the Emergency in June 1975, Rai shot a man pushing a cycle with
two children on it and a woman behind him, with scores of policemen all around.
The caption said: “The situation was normal in Chandni Chowk.” In another,
nearly a decade later in India Today, Rai photographed two
schoolboys—a Hindu and a Sikh—with arms on each others’ shoulders, walking to
school. Taken within days of Operation Bluestar, the caption expressed the hope
that such would be the future of Amritsar,
and the bitterness and bloodshed would be forgotten. There are other great Rai
images—of Mother Teresa, of India’s great classical musicians in an inspired
series with Inderjit Badhwar for India Today magazine [Disclosure: I was their
colleague at that time, between 1988 and 1991.] and the haunting image of a
child being buried in Bhopal, his lifeless eyes admonishing the viewer,
symbolising the thousands who died in Bhopal after the methyl isocyanate leak
from the Union Carbide plant in December 1984.
A Rai photograph is unique
in the way it is interested in the human being—especially the eyes, as Alam
points out in his essay for the book. He is able to get close to the subject
and focus on the eyes, centering stories around individuals; but through this
approach, his photographs suggest ways in which events affect the lives of
those who have no control over larger forces.
Rai first went to witness
the story of refugees from East Pakistan in
August 1971. As he notes, in August “the monsoon was at its peak. The skies
were deep grey and it was raining all the way. The border was not just porous,
it was overflowing from all sides. The refugees with their meager belongings
were pouring in ... they were drenched by the rain, suffering and fatigued.
There was a kind of a silence—nobody was talking. There was nothing the others
did not know.” Their lives were now lived in public; they were part of a human
drama the world was meant to witness. Rai was among those who made sure it did.
What the refugees didn’t
speak about was how their crops were burned (Rai shows us scorched land), their
homes razed (we see shells of homes), their women raped (in a moving
photograph, Rai closes in on a young woman lying on a cot, wearing a sari
without a blouse, her eyes still and dry, her belly bigger than her slender
frame, indicating the child she is carrying but did not want, personifying the
harrowing saga of rapes during that war; by some estimates, there were more
than a quarter million rapes). And even though you only see her in the
photograph, you get her sense of loneliness—she is possibly shunned
because the father of that child she is carrying is a Pakistani soldier. The
relentless violence and humiliation the farmers and fisherfolk and boatmen
faced are visible in the exhausted faces of the refugees, their wrinkles
pronounced, their tears glistening.
The photographs are in black
and white. Rai goes close enough to a man’s face to let you count the whiskers
on his face. His camera stops near the bloodstains on a sari. The head looks up
in another image, and you want to caress the wounded brow. He sharpens the
focus on the human being at the centre of the image, separating him from the
detritus of what remains of the possessions that he carried with him across the
border. The queue of refugees shows some who are wizened, some determined,
carrying their children on their shoulders, their possessions on their heads. A
little boy walks, wearing only a buttonless shirt, smiling and talking to older
boys, oblivious to his surroundings. They are leaving their past, walking to a
different future.
Future’ and ‘safety’ lie
across the river, to cross which the boatman may demand the last bag of rice
the refugee is carrying. Times are bad, but business is business. There are ten
million of them, overwhelming the Indian state—for some time, Tripura has more
refugees than residents. They live in large pipes and in makeshift tents. Rai
shows a stack of pipes, their interiors dark, except for the men who raise
their heads and stare back at this odd man taking their photographs. They live
on rations, forming orderly queues which go out of focus as Rai fixes the lens
on the few in the front of the queue. Children are bathed, old people die, rain
lashes the landscape, diseases spread easily and are fought by stubborn nurses
and doctors working selflessly, round-the-clock, in the camps.
In many ways, Rai brings to
life Allen Ginsberg’s haunting poem, September on Jessore Road:
Millions
of babies watching the skiesBellies
swollen, with big round eyesOn Jessore Road – long
bamboo hutsNo
place to shit but sand channel ruts Millions
of fathers in rainMillions
of mothers in painMillions
of brothers in woeMillions
of sisters nowhere to go
The
lives of these “millions” are lived in the open: nothing is confidential,
nothing secret. Rai witnesses it, clicks the image, preserves it, recording it
for posterity.
However close to reality a
photographer gets, essentially he stays aloof, detached, distinct. Susan Sontag
reminds us in On Photography (1977) that while real people are out
there killing other real people, the photographer remains firmly behind the
camera. Non-intervention is critical. She writes: “Part of the horrors of such
memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of the
Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the
act of bayonetting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how
plausible it has become, in situations where a photographer has the choice
between a life and a photograph, to choose the photograph. The person who
intervenes cannot record; the person who records cannot intervene.”
To intervene or not is a
moral choice: the veteran Newsweek correspondent Edward Behr had a
point when he titled his memoir of reporting from the war in what was then
Belgian Congo, Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English?
(1978). For the photographer, as it is for the reporter, the story is more
important than finding relief for the victim. Kevin Carter, the South African
photographer who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of a starving child in
Sudan crouching, bent, almost supine on the ground, while a vulture waited,
took his own life a year later. And in his suicide note he wrote of how he was
tormented by images of war and starvation.
There is a human narrative
in the dry statistic that ten million refugees crossed the border and came to India. This
book tells some of those stories. What would Sontag make of Rai’s images? To be
sure, they are intrusive. To be sure, the photographer is in control, not the
subject. To be sure, the subject’s narrative will now be public in a manner
that Rai chooses to depict the story. And yet, Rai honours the subject,
photographing her with humility, so that the hero that emerges is not the
photographer, but the refugee. And this is not because Rai hasn’t tried
hard—the composition is impeccable, as is the way Rai lets natural light fall
on a face to illuminate it, the way he allows shadows to darken moods, and the
way eyes glisten and shine in the images.
In Regarding
The Pain of Others, Sontag’s 2003 book that can be seen as a
follow-up to On Photography,where she
continues her arguments about photography, but brings them to a closure with
provocative questions, she wrote: “Neither is the photograph supposed to repair
our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and
frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to
reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered
by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible?
Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we
have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?”
Wars affect everyone, but
women and children bear the brunt because they are rarely among the combatants,
and they face the consequences of decisions others have taken on their behalf,
without asking them. Rai’s triumph lies in how well he shows the effect of war
on women. There is the woman with her head covered, gnarled fingers resting on
her knees, over which she places her chin. A woman carries her sole surviving
pot in her right hand and the breastfeeding infant in the left, a gamchhacovering
her torso. Another woman, older, sitting in a tattered palki,
is being carried by two men with taut muscles. A windswept rice field with a
coconut tree in the background, and an old woman walking, with her back bent at
a right angle, a stick guiding her forward, her feet bare. Another girl, not
yet a woman, bare-chested, stirring a pot, her hair wet. A naked child lying on
the ground, between the large pipes in which families have taken shelter. And that
image, of the mother holding tight her child whose ribs you can count. The
child looks at the mother’s emaciated breast. The mother herself is skeletal
and realises she can’t feed her child. Pathos has rarely been captured so
movingly; and yet, responses vary—in Dhaka,
those young men at the art gallery giggled when they saw her.
RAI Is A STORY-TELLER, who likes to focus on the
human drama. If Associated Press’s Joe Rosenthal took the memorable picture of
six determined soldiers valiantly raising the American flag on Mt Suribachi
during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, consecrating a military conquest by
endowing it with patriotism, Rai shows his soldier spending a quiet moment in a
village playing with a rabbit. Does that make Rai’s soldier more human? Or is
this tranquil moment what the soldier needs before he can knock down the doors
of collaborators’ huts, and beat the hell out of the men who have acted as
informers for the Pakistani army? Rai’s photography sidesteps that question.
Rai’s great contemporary,
the late Kishore Parekh, who went to the same war, and was often at the same
place shooting the same people, saw the war differently. In Bangladesh: A Brutal Birth (1972), which collects Parekh’s
photographs of the war, there are several images similar to Rai’s—but many are
more brutal. Parekh’s book is now out of print, but a dedicated fan has
uploaded it on the website Scribd, from where it can be downloaded free of
cost. Rai shows hungry children crying out for food; Parekh shows a dead boy
lying on the road, the bottom half of his body soaking in blood. Parekh’s
soldiers don’t play with a rabbit; they knock down doors, beat up people, look
inside the lungis of men to see if they are concealing
any weapons. Rai’s Mukti Bahini guerrillas ride a cycle-rickshaw with their
guns, smiling at the photographer. Parekh’s are meting out instant justice to
those who helped the Pakistani army during the war. In Parekh’s universe, death
is real: a crow picks at the open wounds of a dead body.
Parekh’s soldiers are
loading weapons, ready to battle. Rai shows the cloud of dust that the army
trucks emit as the convoy leaves for the battlefront. Both show wounded
soldiers carried by their comrades; the resignation in the eyes of a Pakistani
soldier who is unsure what the enemy will do to him, as he is being laid on a
stretcher with Indian soldiers carrying him to a field hospital; the anxiety of
an Indian jawan, being calmed by his compatriots as medics treat him. And there
are ghastly images of dead bodies—adults and children, lying in ponds and along
riverbeds. Faced with that finality, Rai doesn’t hesitate—he shoots. But in the
way Rai has composed that specific shot, it seems as if he has paused to
consider lighting, and shot the bodies with sunlight resting on their torsos,
granting them some dignity as they lie in a ditch. Parekh, too, shows dead
bodies, but he horrifies you by bringing you closer to a dead face, reminding
the viewer that there is nothing glorious in such a death. The contrast between
Rai’s vision and Parekh’s is clear: for Parekh, photography is the means to
record reality, however unpalatable; for Rai, photography is imbued with a
purpose, to capture the human spirit.
Rai ends triumphantly,
taking us to the public surrender ceremony, where a confident General Jagjit
Singh Arora strides purposefully towards the desk, alongside the Pakistani
General Niazi keeping his eyes low, unable to look at the camera, trying hard
not to betray any emotion. (In Parekh’s book that photograph appears only once,
taken from some distance, as the men walk to the tent). Later Parekh takes us
to the streets of old Dhaka, where the Mukti
Bahini guerrillas have some unfinished business to deal with. Parekh is right
behind them as they crouch and move stealthily towards abandoned homes from
where snipers have fired, as they remain unwilling to surrender. A single shoe
lies abandoned in the lower right corner of the photograph, suggesting someone
escaped in a hurry. Surrender or not, we are at war.
Parekh’s book ends with a
beautiful image of two boys chasing a calf in a mustard field, almost presaging
Rai’s image of the Hindu and Sikh boy in Amritsar
13 years later, seeking to remind the viewer of a happier, more innocent time.
A pastoral, more pleasant past will become the future; the future won’t mean an
escape from the past. Parekh’s image is black-and-white and you can’t see the
shining, overpowering yellow of the mustard set on a bright green field, but
the sun does the trick, making the mustard shimmer even in a black-and-white
image. Rai’s focus is on people, though, and his final image is of Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman, greeting his people from atop a flower-bedecked truck, flanked
by Tajuddin Ahmed who had run the government-in-exile. Over a dozen supporters
have crammed the top and the truck tries to make its way to a political rally,
amid what can only be described as a sea of humanity.
There is a story in these
pictures—a neat beginning, middle and end. Both Rai and Parekh witnessed the
war. Parekh, more the journalist, wanted to ensure that nothing he saw would
get forgotten; Rai, more the artist, wanted his pictures to tell the human
story. Both chose to record, not to intervene. But what they recorded forced
the world to intervene. And it is stories of such interventions—of George
Harrison and Ravi Shankar packing Madison
Square Garden
at the Concert for Bangladesh,
of the international community’s warm-hearted relief for the refugees, of the
courage of Indian soldiers and Mukti Bahini warriors—that ended the tyranny the
Pakistani army had unleashed.
Sontag implored her readers
to react to the images they saw—to reflect, to pay attention, and to learn from
the mass suffering. What caused it? Where did the responsibility lie? “Is there
some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be
challenged?” she asked. Parekh’s photographs forced us to think 40 years ago;
the discovery of Rai’s negatives, and indeed the publication of this volume,
remind us why those questions are still relevant.
Salil Tripathi is a Contributing
Editor at The Caravan. He is a columnist at Mint,
and a London-based author who writes for major international newspapers
