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A date with history

IN FOCUS Classical dancer Indrani Rahman, Communist leader EMS Namboodiripad, and an image from Janah's Bengal famine series.

“Sunil Janah’s trajectory is actually that of two decades of India. He documented the last decade of the freedom struggle and the first decade of the Nehruvian era,” says a visibly excited Ram Rahman as he shows Janah’s images on his computer at his apartment in New Delhi’s Sham Nath Marg. The broad smile continues to grace the lensman’s face as he pulls out books — like “The Second Creature” designed by Satyajit Ray — now rare and old — which feature his senior’s work or are based on him. Being from the same profession, endorsing a similar school of thought, both ideologically and professionally, Rahman knows the value of such a vast body of fine work and why it should be seen and talked about. The slice of history captured by Janah, India’s most famous photographer in the ’40s, is extraordinary. “India has never seen this work in totality and some of them havenever been seen. The younger generation of photographers hardly knows him,” says Rahman who is delivering an illustrated lecture on the legend, “India in the 1940s and 50s: Sunil Janah’s Photographs”, at Teen Murti this coming Saturday.

The guests would be given an insight into his work with the help of 500 images of Janah — standalone pictures and also his work published elsewhere. The lecture is based on the mammoth retrospective put together by Rahman in New York in 1998.

“Such an exhibition is not possible here because all the originals are with Janah who lives in California. He has become reclusive, eccentric and suspicious of people misusing his pictures which actually happened a lot. The permission to first digitise the images and then show them was given to me because of the relationship he had with my grandmother Ragini. He had done her portfolios.,” he says.

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