Inverting the lens

• SHIV VISVANATHAN

Raghu Rai’s latest book and exhibition offer a moment of peace in these times of hysteria, a pause that offers the promise and possibility of being and becoming Indian

Today, when newspapers are full of the noise of pollution and the hysteria of communal protests, one longs for a moment, a space for reflection, a pause where being and becoming an Indian becomes possible. Raghu Rai’s exhibition of his great photographs along with the publication of his book offered one such occasion. This essay is not a review or a report but tries to convey a sense of the man and his ideas in this moment of history. Raghu Rai’s work is a lens, a mirror and a kaleidoscope of India. His idea of photography is not the Western idea of the gaze, what the critic John Berger called “looking”.

Shiv Visvanathan

His is not the linear perspective surveying the earth to map it and to exploit it. Instead of looking with its linearity, its objectivity, Rai offers as a playful counter, the idea of darshan. Berger and other scholars like Robert Romanyshyn have pointed out that looking carries a sense of objectification and voyeurism, while darshan invites respect. Darshan is an attitude and as an attitude has three elements. It is a cosmic, spiritual sense that there is a God in every grain. Secondly, it seeks the reality of a place or person, the inner aura which is his essence. Great photographs are about darshan, the art of connecting to the essence of a person or place. Photography, claims Rai, becomes more about connectivity than causality. A photograph becomes an invitation into an experience, a sense of sharing the blessing of insight. Unlike the act of looking, darshan combines sight and insight. It is descriptive and interpretative, semaphoring an I-Thou rather than an I-It relationship between the photographer and the subject. Vision has aspects of darshan, while looking is more a matter of perspective.

Rai’s book is about a journey, a pilgrimage. It is his vision of India reflected in pictures. To grasp it, one has to understand the tacit categories underlying it. Rai seems to think India is a civilisation, a cosmology enacted in its everydayness rather than the history or the logic of a nation state. Nature becomes central to his vision. This is caught best in his conversation, his literal complicity with clouds. Clouds are his visual comrades, changing the frame, the way one sees an activity. Clouds provide nuance, horizon, and shades of time. It is like nature listening in and fine-tuning culture. In the notes to his picture of the village pond, Rai says, “The skies are no longer the limit; they have become part of my being. When life takes shelter under the skies, a whole new space has opened up for me.”

Nature also seems to provide an ethical fine-tuning system, a way of commenting on politics. It is there in the first picture of the title page that portrays a drought in Rajasthan. The then Chief Minister Mohan Lal Sukhadia had promised to build roads to generate employment for his people but had done little towards it. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi arrives to inspect the project but cuts her trip short when she hears of President Zakir Hussain’s demise. As the helicopter arrives to whisk her away, “the metaphoric dust that Sukhadia was throwing into the eyes of his people becomes real as sand is sprayed everywhere and the crowd struggles to cover its eyes.” Nature, Rai seems to say, can eventually call the bluff of any politician.

The second picture is bleaker, the background almost apocalyptic. Rai visits Pokhran in 1974, the site where India conducted its first nuclear tests. Rai arrived late and the test was over. He captured the event indirectly by photographing the tyre tracks left by hundreds of jeeps that had travelled the path. The picture points to the cosmic desolation that follows a nuclear test. The caption ‘Buddha smiling’ captures the ethical inanity of our technocratic elite that can insult language while messing with nature

If a moment of unease haunts the book, it is the restlessness, a will to power that marks the photographs of Indira Gandhi. It is almost as if she will not let India sleep or rest because she cannot rest. Her face disturbs because not even her search for spiritual solace is convincing. She conveys the perpetual insecurity of power. The picture of a cleaner curiously watching one of her pictures lying in electoral defeat in a dustbin says it all. Rai does not have to evoke Lenin’s idiom of the dustbin of history. Art says it more subtly and devastatingly.

The collection has a lot on politics but with Rai’s own interpretive spin to it. For Rai, India is a country where spiritual power perpetually challenges political power. Mother Teresa and Dalai Lama have a larger-than-life status compared to Indira Gandhi, Bhutto or Bhindranwala. His Holiness looks like a clown surveying the cosmos and Mother Teresa like a sculpture, her hands in prayer.

Rai loves faces, especially creative faces, as his pictures of Ravi Shankar, Balachander, and MS show. There is homeliness to Bismillah Khan as he sits with a cigarette. You can understand him now when he says “I want my shehnai to smell of the kebabs of Benares”. Rai grasps their creativity. In fact, in a conversation he talked of Mallikarjun Mansur and one sensed how the simplicity of the man was the other side of his genius, like Dalai Lama’s jokes and Mother Teresa’s prayer.

Rai loves nature and he waits for it in anticipation. He somehow feels nature senses your attitude, makes spaces for you, allows for moments of creativity and surprise. It is like his picture of the sparrows all munching contentedly. He admits, “The picture was interesting, but not interesting enough.” An empirical fact. Then a large black bird enters and instead of scurrying away, the sparrows make place for it. It is as if nature has choreographed the picture and the moment for Rai and he is grateful for what he calls ‘the blessing’.

Deep down, Rai’s work is a tribute to urban India. Yet his urban India goes beyond the urbanity and urbanism of Weber, Simmel, Benjamin or the Chicago sociologists. His classic ‘Chawri Bazaar’, with its seething diversity and its spectrums of time, recalls Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades project. Animals, vehicles, humans blend here in a way that is a celebration of modern India. The photograph becomes a tribute to the diversities we tend to forget or the livelihoods that blend into each other. ‘Chawri Bazaar’ is a picture one keeps returning to; as if this were the road India should have taken. I see ‘Chawri Bazaar’ as a tribute to the spirit of Delhi, to the archaeology of an India that disappeared a few decades ago. Chawri Bazaar is not the past. Looking back, one realises it is a model, a heuristic for a future India that goes beyond the idiocy of smart cities and planned boulevards.

The way Rai combines history and everydayness in many playful ways makes the city appear not in its monumentality but through the lazy eyes of someone sleeping on its parapets. The historicity of Humayun’s Tomb is challenged by the energy and poetry of women threshing grain near its walls. A sense of everydayness and its energy invades the city. The city becomes an unlabelled symphony of diversities merging to create new packets of energy, an energy that Rai senses and vibrates with. It is almost as though photography as a philosophy cannot develop without experiencing a city like Delhi, Benares or Calcutta. Each one is a cosmology in stone, to be experienced for the rhythms of time they create. His ghats and roofs have a touch of primordial, eternal time.

As I walked around, the pictures reminded me of a distinction the French philosopher Giles Deleuze makes. He differentiates between tap root and rhizome. Tap root unravels structure, dichotomises between right and left, display symmetry. Tap roots are canonical and classical; rhizomes create surprise, ambush. Rai is suggesting, like most Indians, an alternative, a mixed metaphor, where tap roots become rhizomes, where rocks, clouds, skin, bodies and faces share a common citizenship of recognition and add to the sensuality of the universe.

One comes back again and again to the word ‘darshan’. It is a philosophical term and an ordinary language word that is layered in folklore. Darshan combines what Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber said more limply. Levinas asked us to remember the face of the other, and Buber summoned the I-Thou in each to confront the I-It in life. Darshan sees the God in all of us and recognises that nature is full of gods we must honour. Darshan is a search for God in life and the camera becomes an act of faith, a heuristics of searching that celebrates the inner aura in a person, place, face, root or stone.

One walks around the photographs, drinks a kulhad of hot tea and walks back to look again. This is an India that still breathes, that one does not want to let go off. If genius is the power to revive the slumbering God in oneself, Rai has attained a shaman’s power. He has actually captured a true idea of India beyond brands, beyond the illiteracy of the nation state. One is deeply grateful for that.

Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy

Keywords: Shiv Visvanathan, Raghu Rai, photography, India

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