Visual stories carry the weight of history and are our safety net against the fallibility of memory. Raghu Rai’s camera has been at the frontline of the most exceptional and the most quotidian of moments. Street life dominates the black and white images of his stunning ongoing show A Thousand Lives at the Kiran Nadar Museum in Delhi and offers a visual journey through his analog work from 1965-2005.
In their introductory essay, the curators of the show Roobina Karode and Devika Daulet-Singh write, “This exhibition focuses on the pre-digital phase of Rai’s career, when he used analog/ film photography, exploring it with unprecedented fervour, freedom and imagination. From his inexhaustible archives of photographs that defy being contained easily within any of his exhibitions, a fresh slice has been pulled out which brings many extraordinary photographs into the public domain for the first time.”
A section of the exhibition has a selection of Rai’s photo-essay on Jayaprakash Narayan and the volatile 1974 Bihar student movement. It documents some of the most defining moments of its tumultuous history. Rai’s reportage involved keeping his camera trained on Narayan and his followers and getting as close to the action as possible.
He visited Patna, a riverside city spread across twelve miles of the Ganga River, at a pivotal moment of the city’s history, taking visceral snapshots of human settlements cramming the river’s southern banks and ferries moored for transportation.
The economic precarity of the region were chronicled by his graphic images of the Jharia coalfields – now in Jharkhand – where underground fires were belching poisonous fumes, as well as the single evocative monochrome image of a decrepit poster of the 1974 movie Roti Kapada aur Makaan.
In his relentless pursuit of meaningful stories Rai travelled 118 kilometres by road from Patna to Narayan’s ancestral home in Sitabdiara, a relatively quiet and bucolic village situated near the confluence of the Ganga and the Saryu. Rai returned after to the capital city, the primary theatre of resistance exploding in mass protests.
By February 1974, Bihar’s college and university campuses were turning into debating clubs and battlegrounds, flyers marking walls everywhere. Students gathered for impromptu meetings to argue and agitate as campuses were abuzz with incessant conversations about soaring prices, unemployment and corruption.
The Bihar Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti, a student outfit, was at the forefront of the movement. Its student leaders approached Narayan and persuaded him to lead the struggle and give it a constructive shape.
Lampooning Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for “living in a fool’s paradise”, the 72-year-old led a silent procession on April 8 to protest the police excesses of the previous three weeks. Rai provided a compelling visual record of the brewing storm: people chanting, marching, picketing and offering dharna before the assembly gates.
The government spared no effort in scuttling the protests. Several train, bus and steamer services were disrupted. Despite the impediments and soaring temperatures, more than a million people gathered at various venues to listen to Narayan. They were not disappointed. His speeches, delivered in impeccable Hindi and strong on emotionally charged rhetoric, were evocative of the revolutionary days of 1942.
Political resistance took many forms. It created ground-breaking political art and literature. Rai captured the live theatre in all its complexity, freezing the decisive standalone moments of the movement.
Even though Narayan repeatedly said that the movement was unconstitutional but democratic and non-violent, the protests were not entirely free of coercive violence. Shopkeepers were forced to pull down their shutters and trains and buses were arbitrarily stopped. At Bhabua, Sasaram, Samastipur, Sitamarhi, Muzaffarpur and Danapur stations, young children blocked railway tracks. The images of the rail roko andolan have a stunning visual potency.
Rai photographed the groundswell of support for Narayan in Delhi, too. More than 50,000 people from across the country congregated in Delhi at the Gandhi Samadhi at Rajghat on October 6. They marched through the main streets, joined in large numbers by teachers and students from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
After the march, a six-member delegation led by Acharya Kripalani met Gandhi to hand over a memorandum demanding the dissolution of the Bihar Assembly. The prime minister remained unmoved, asserting that she would resign rather than concede to the demand.
Rai’s camera then moved back to Bihar to document the November 4 rally. Although the entire city was barricaded, protesters came in large numbers, defying odds, crossing the swollen river the previous night in makeshift boats made with banana stumps. They congregated at the Congress Maidan, huddled against each other as they waited for dawn.
In the morning, even before Narayan left his residence at 9 am, a crowd of nearly 50,000 was waiting for him near Gandhi Maidan. He was in an open-air jeep surrounded by students. Chanting slogans, the protesters surged onwards to Gandhi Maidan, where the police seized the jeep. But no one could have foreseen the events that ensued, not even Rai.
Undeterred, Narayan led a huge procession that faced a phalanx of armed police. Students at the front line were dragged and thrashed. The street was filled with smoke and tear gas as Narayan joined the students in breaking through the cordon.
Just then, he was hit by a baton in the full glare of Rai’s camera. Ignoring the searing pain, Narayan continued to walk towards the chief minister’s residence. Later, he jumped in a bus crowded with detainees. The photographs of Narayan being beaten with sickening ferocity became the most defining images of Gandhi’s repressive regime.
Narayan’s differences with Gandhi were now direct and public. Comparing her to Jawaharlal Nehru, he said India’s first prime minister had been a democrat and a visionary but she was an autocrat who was killing democracy.
Addressing a mammoth crowd at the Ramlila Maidan on June 25, Narayan called for a prolonged and widespread civil disobedience movement against Gandhi. Rai’s camera recorded this historic moment. Emergency was imposed the same night, bypassing the cabinet, striking like a thunderbolt that subverted the norms of parliamentary democracy. The situation was only upturned on January, 18, 1977 when, in an unexpected and dramatic move, Gandhi dissolved the Lok Sabha and called for elections in March.
Rai's photographs of the pledge-taking ceremony of the newly-elected Janata Dal leaders at Rajghat and at their first meeting are memorable. Led by Narayan and in the presence of Acharya Kripalani, Prime Minister Morarji Desai and Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram can be seen taking a pledge with other leaders to uphold the rights of the people, promote national unity and harmony, and practise austerity and honesty in their personal and public lives. The radiance of Narayan’s ebullient face captured on camera represents a serendipitous moment.
By the end of March, however, Narayan was on the brink of a serious health crisis. He was in and out of Mumbai’s Jaslok Hospital as he dealt with end-stage renal complications. Poignant photographs of the last phase of his life, when the internal squabbles of the Janata Party and his frequent dialysis that wore him out, were taken in 1978 and the early months of 1979.
JP died in Patna on 8th October, 1979, three days before his 77th birthday. Rai’s Nikon camera followed his funeral procession and photographed Chandra Shekhar, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and other prominent leaders, joined by thousands of ordinary men and women in bidding farewell to the greatest keeper, after Gandhi, of India’s political conscience.
A former civil servant, Sujata Prasad is an author, curator and columnist. Raghu Rai’s visual chronical of JP and the student movement is part of her book The Dream of Revolution.
