Tarun Bhartiya recently exhibited his mesmerising black-and-white photographs of the everyday lives of people, places, and objects of religious significance in Ri Hynniewtrep or East Meghalaya. Titled “Niam/Faith/Hynniewtrep”, the exhibition drew curious crowds in places like Wayanad in Kerala and Ahmedabad in Gujarat. It was the last exposition of a life of observation, engagement and solidarity that many of us were blessed to be a part of.

Bhartiya suffered a cardiac arrest and died on January 25 in Woodlands Hospital in Shillong. He had so much else planned out for 2025 and beyond.

A sea of humanity turned up to see him off on the day of his funeral on January 27. Representatives of the Hawkers’ Association, the Nurses’s Union, colleagues from the media and mass communication centre that he nurtured in St Anthony’s College, activists from the region and mainland India, singers, and his family came to pay homage to a person who loved and lived among communities where care, affection and sharing is unquestioned.

As those at the gathering spoke, those listening were reminded of all that Bhartiya had done for the region since he returned to the town of his youth in the late 1990s. With Bhartiya having been part of internationally feted media initiatives as a film editor, a student of his described him as one of Shillong’s most famous personalities. She was not exaggerating.

With his passing, North East India (and Shillong in particular) has lost its foremost archivist and chronicler of sad, happy, ordinary and extraordinary events and people. Most academics, researchers, journalists, and activists who have been to Shillong will attest to having shared a cup of tea and biscuits with Bhartiya, his partner Angela Rangad and the two imperial cats who graced their home in Lumpyngnad.

Rangad was often busy with her advocacy work, so Bhartiya would welcome visitors home as he juggled household chores and conversation. He was a storehouse of information, advice and kindness and he always listened to what his guests were saying.

He would modestly narrate his recent engagements when asked, reminding us how he quietly inspired so many people. I often teased him about appearing in two recent bestselling books where Shillong was an important backdrop. Kynpham Nongkyrih’s Funeral Nights and Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches referred to him by name, with affection and respect that only a few can evoke.

Tarun Bhartiya grew up in Shillong at a time when the city offered refuge to the children of middle-class people from the North East. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed much civic and political unrest in Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. Parents who could afford to send their children to Shillong did so, hoping they would remain safe and cocooned from the political unrest in their home states.

It made Shillong an unlikely place where various identities coexisted and sometimes thrived.

Bhartiya came of age in a left-wing, scholastic home. His father, Professor MN Karna, was one of the founding members of the sociology department at North Eastern Hill University. Karna’s colleagues at the department included some of India’s best-known social anthropologists, such as Virginius Xaxa, AC Sinha and C Nunthara.

Bhartiya and his siblings were drawn into the lives of their father’s colleagues in a typical South Asian way, and he remained close to them until the end.

After school, Bhartiya moved to Delhi, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at Delhi University’s Kirori Mal College. The 1990s were a difficult time for Delhi University students. The anti-Mandal agitations polarised students. However, two other significant events also left their mark on campus politics, perhaps permanently.

The first was the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the other was the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Far from becoming despondent, Bhartiya decided to take matters into his own hands. He left his hostel room, leaving a note for his local guardian. “Tell father that the bird has flown the coop”, the note reportedly said.

After several phone calls (in the pre-mobile phone era), the guardian discovered that Bhartiya had left for Ayodhya. He had volunteered as a peace activist and was staying at the local office of the Community Party of India. It was something that only Tarun Bhartiya would have conjured up. He had to be at the place where the world was likely to change irreversibly and try to stop the tide of hate.

Returning to Shillong towards the end of the 1990s was a characteristically deliberate decision. It was the worst time to be young and idealistic in the North East. Meghalaya was subjected to military, paramilitary and police actions, ostensibly against insurgents.

Shillong became the crucible of ferment, grievances and repression of every kind. Decades of poor governmental planning and excessive privatisation of community resources, like coal, led to rising inequalities.

Furthermore, the Union government had decided to mine for uranium in Domiasiat in the South West Khasi Hills, against the local community’s wishes. Bhartiya dived into this fecund environment, ensuring he never lost hope – and spreading as much of it as possible.

Armed with his camera and some microphones, he spent weeks and months amplifying the voices of resistance. He met his icon in Domiasiat: Kong Spelity Lyngdoh, who died in 2020, leaving him mourning her passing for several months. She epitomised the genius and generosity of the human spirit that he saw in abundance in the region. That is why he remained in Shillong, voyaging out to places for work that validated his decision to return.

In the years since his return, he devoted his time to projects that others would have found difficult. He was an integral part of the Shillong Digital Archives Directory, along with Andrew May, the Australian historian and author of The Empire of the Clouds in North-East India. He conspired to do a photo essay or book on the paradoxical world of mining and agriculture in the Khasi-Jaintia hills with Swedish anthropologist Bengt Karlsson. Recently, he collaborated on decoding the diaries of Heraka prophetess Gaidinliu with the Naga anthropologist Arkotong Longkumer.

Few people in India would have the capacity to make sense of this almost delirious universe that Bhartiya inhabited.

He described himself on his social media accounts as a “middle-class, Marxist, Maithil documentary image-maker from Shillong”. He consciously invoked each of these identities to challenge received notions about what they represent. He wanted his middle-class identity to reflect the unwavering socialist disposition of past generations; his Marxism belonged to an old-fashioned era, but it understood the angst of Gen Z and tolerated the vacillating behaviour of millennials; he embraced Maithil in its culturally expansive ability to belong to the Buddhist-Ashokan past, as well as its Indo-Nepal borderland identity of the present; he was an exacting editor and image-maker whose photographs, films, and documentaries help us raise questions that we did not know we could ask.

Finally, in his assertion of belonging to Shillong, he left us with a world of affection, occasional despair and everlasting hope that the town would remain a sanctuary for those seeking shelter.

I write this obituary in disbelief and grief from Santa Cruz, California. We met barely a fortnight ago in Guwahati, where I coaxed him and Angela Rangad to participate in a silver jubilee celebration. He was much more than a friend. We shared an inexplicable love of trivia, Eduardo Galeano, sentimental Urdu poetry, rice beer, road trips, staring at Sohra sunsets, and our small circle of comrades, friends and family.

I will remember him as someone always happy because the universe had been unbelievably generous with him. Every moment he spent with his partner, Angela, and their children, Abia, Kyntang, and Maïan, were gifts he treasured immeasurably. That is why he did not have a trace of envy in his relationships with other people.

He would have wanted me to make sense of his absence by referencing everything happening worldwide. Will the ceasefire between Hamas and the brutal Zionist regime hold? Why can’t the wealthiest country in the world contain wildfires, even as they send expensive bombs to Israel? Can we in South Asia be inspired and learn from our local revolutions in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and (earlier) Nepal? Can we avoid majoritarian hubris in our modern nation-states?

I have no credible answer that would satisfy him. However, as my bereaved heart tries to make sense of his absence, I take refuge in Inside, a Bill Morrissey song that I am listening to (and one that I know he would endorse):

“…And you won’t leave now because I know
You’re just like me, with no place to go
No place to go; it’s just a matter of time
You’ll find somewhere, it’s just a matter of time
This ain’t Hollywood
It never really gets so good
Call it love if you think it should
(But) no need to explain”

Leit Suk, Bah Tarun!

Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora is an Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Read Tarun Bhartiya’s essays for Scroll here.