Saturday, 14 July 2012

responses to my sunil janah post.


From my wordpress blog.  


Arjun Janah writes in and my quick response . a longer essay will follow .
This posting is an example of the kinds of things that drove people like Mr. Janah from India. The “nudes” of village and tribal women that Mr. Sharma refers to are not nudes in the accepted sense. They are portraits of women as they were, in the attire (often uncovered on top) that was their normal mode of dress. As such, they are a documentation, like much of Mr. Janah’s work, of the people and the country that he grew up in — and were part of the work of opening the eyes of people in different parts of the country to the ways of life of those in other, distant parts.
In this, he was continuing the work started by the cultural wing of the CPI under P.C. Joshi. Mr. Janah did not ask these women to undress. He photographed them as they were — just as he had photographed so many other people and events of his times.
But these portraits of village and tribal women were also, clearly, a celebration of their beauty and femininity, free of the covering up and suppression of sexuality imposed on subjugated women by Hindu-Aryan, Muslim or Christian male domination and insecurity over the ages. As Mr. Janah clearly stated, he was drawn naturally to photograph these women because he was a man.
Mr. Janah did not publish his portraits of nude or semi-nude urban women, because he knew that the attitudes prevailing among too many middle class and other Indians in many parts of the country, unused to seeing women going bare-breasted (as they did in parts of Kerala, in certain tribal areas and, at least while bathing in public, even in his native Bengal) would create problems for these women, who had willingly posed for him and had trusted in his discretion. He had hoped, perhaps, that a time would come when these attitudes would change and these women or their descendants would be pleased to have these pictures available for view. Clearly, judging from the tone of this posting, that has yet to happen.
It is noteworthy that many of the “great” painters, sculptors and photographers of the west are praised for their celebration of the nude human figure, while those who are Indian, instead of being praised, are snidely attacked and condemned.
Mr. Janah was short in stature — and he used, for many years, a Roleiflex that he held at waist level or slightly higher, looking down at the horizontal ground-glass viewfinder to compose the photograph. This naturally led to the phenomenon Mr. Sharma refers to.
But, inadvertently, it led to the “heroic effect” seen in many Soviet and other Communist posters of that era, that celebrated the physicality of the worker or peasant. If Mr. Sharma wishes only to focus on the breasts, he is free to do so. It is but natural for a man. He should delight in it instead of being critical, perhaps. But there is far more to the two pictures that he has posted here than just the mammaries, as any one with an eye for great portraiture will testify. T
hese are classic images that show Indian village women in their natural dignity, and rival or exceed the impact of the celebrated female images of the west — from the marbles of Greece to the paintings of Goya and others. They are unforgettable.
But again, this focus on what was a tiny part of Mr. Janah’s work distracts us from the whole. He photographed the great famines in Bengal/Orissa and later in South India in the 1940′s. He documented the peasant, worker and independence movements and the bloody partition of the country with its riots and refugees. He traveled to remote corners of the country to photograph the tribal populations. His images of temple sculpture and architecture were used by many others, such as Mulk Raj Anand and A. Goswami, to make not only a name for themselves but also a living, while Mr. Janah was given scarce or no credit or compensation.
His photographs of the late classical dancer, Shanta Rao, were published in a wonderful book with text by Ashoke Chatterjee. And his portraits of other dancers, singers, writers, artists, scientists and other cultural figures from the 1930′s to the 1970′s and beyond, added to those of political leaders from Mohandas Gandhi, Jinnah, Bose, Patel, Azad, Nehru to Indira Gandhi and Chandrasekhar constitute a visual who’s who of the subcontinent ranging over many decades.
It is disheartening that the trend among some in India continues to be to denigrate their own prodigies while continuing to look up to those of the West. Mr. Janah enjoyed the caamarderie and respect of stellar western photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson and Margaret Bourke White. But in his own country, he was unable, in his time, to get acknowledgement or to publish his full range of photographs. The ones that he was able to publish — often not his own selection but that of the publishers — such as the beautiful women in The Second Creature, from the 1940′s, brought him only scorn that persists, as we see, to this day. The rest of his astounding work was largely ignored. If you read the preface to the book, you will see that the title is a reference to the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic creation myth, with Ava/Eve/Hawwa being the second creature — but hence the more perfect (as any student of biology and genetics will agree with).
If only Mr. Sharma would take the time and trouble to remember the range and impact of the photographs he had seen when he last interviewed Mr. Janah in 1995,
in New Delhi, then perhaps he would not cast stones at the pyre.

  • Thank you for the comment mr janah. This is a quick reply to continue the debate. and a debate is definitely needed. For now, let me take up just a few of your points.
    “not nudes” ? are they then just naked women? does their being ‘naturally” so make them less naked to viewers?
    a documentaion of ” the way they were”…. no photography, you must know, is a neutral document.. It is always a view point . a personal perspective.
    “the low rollieflex angle in the hands of a short man ”
    Sunil may have been short but i doubt the tribal women were much taller than he was. The Rollie, you know, is equipped with an eye level finder and a eye level sports finder, so the low angle used is a concious choice and not necessarily one that makes for ‘heroic’ soviet style portraits. One just has to read the caption that Sunil gave to one of the pictures I used. ” I took this photograph from a low angle to emphasize her character” That low angle and the cropping close to her breasts tells the whole story – where the emphasis is. visually speaking.
    Yes there was a lot of Sunil’s work that i know of. It has been written about . published .Very little writing, though , actually looks at the problems of some of his documentation.Very little thought is give to the problems in the ‘documentation’ of the lesser ‘Other’ in India . The politics of that gaze ( and it is not just sunil’s political/personal gaze) is something that interests me a lot. I is something ,i hope, we will begin to debate in india. Will be allowed to debate – without being accused of ‘casting stones’.

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