A nation captured in arresting images

Finally, I reached the boiling point. In metaphorical terms: the precise moment when the dal on the stove froths over into a messy hot puddle on the kitchen floor.

In other words: basta is basta. One of the national dailies had three (or was it four) consecutive pages filled with just page3 folk. Yet another paper had an entire column on how to be a socialite, an “occupation” that bestows the credentials to have your mug — and the rest of you — on the hallowed pages. This for many has come to signify heaven-on-earth. And for much of our media the face of shining India they like to put on show.

It was that very day, later in the evening, that I went to an exhibition of photographs by octogenarian Ram Dhamija, titled Preoccupations: Forty Years of Imaging India. The bad mood vanished and hope was restored. The contrast between the current crop of quick-on-the-draw chroniclers of our times and what I saw here could not have been starker.

Through these black and white photographs, predominantly portraits, Dhamija has tracked the journey of an emergent nation, spanning four decades from the late 1940s through much of the 1970s. 

It is the silent pulse of history of a nation walking towards a promising dawn that we hear beating beneath these arresting images. The photographs are portrayals of the quotidian moment and of quotidian lives, several with wit and a tinge of humour. There’s no big drama here nor are there any oh-my-gosh pictorial epiphanies. No tricks of technology but the magic of the moment frozen in time.

You see the big story behind the little stories: a highway in Rajasthan in the 1960s, a man with a child in a drought-ravaged Rajasthan in 1969, a pucca sahib in a suit and hat with a pipe in his mouth inspecting a canal in Punjab in the early 1950s, architect Le Corbusier at a construction site in Chandigarh in the 1950s, a soldier in Ladakh in 1962 during the India-China war, sadhus at a Kumbh mela in 1954, MF Husain painting outside Jama Masjid in the 1970s, a sequence of images of the legendary Balasaraswati dancing, up close and personal. 

You also see a relatively young Indira Gandhi in 1968 in Bhutan with hair made untidy by a stubborn wind, a coat casually flung over her shoulders like a woman of the world. Dhamija has caught her in an indeterminate mood — a hint of both a frown and a smile on a face more filled out than we are used to seeing and a chin not so sharply defined as it came to be later.

Dhamija, a writer and editor and aficionado of the arts (performing as well as crafts) he worked for the Press Information Bureau. The job required constant travelling to all corners of the country with his Rolleicord camera as a constant companion.  

Consequently, there is an ethnographer’s eye at work: the portraits include tribal women, sadhus, farmers, porters and pilgrims in far corners of India. However, you don’t feel the distance between the photographer and his subjects. They seem to be at ease. Particularly alluring is the portrait of Simkie, Uday Shankar’s French dance partner who obviously shared a special relationship with the photographer: warmth radiates from the image.  

Dhamija neither exoticised nor eroticised his subjects, unlike our shutterbugs who zoom in on bits and parts of the neo-tribes of today’s instant celebrities. Dhamija’s son, cinematographer Himman Dhamija (Mangal Pandey, Chandni Chowk to China, Little Zizou) has curated this exhibition, culling the images from thousands of negatives lying round in his father’s Press Enclave flat.

Dhamija had put away his camera years earlier, disillusioned by the direction in which India was heading — corruption was his bete noir. I hope this exhibition will prod the idealist-turned-cynic to pick up his camera once again and go out and capture the India of today.

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist