To call it a delightful slice of history would be an understatement because what’s on view at Tasveer Art Gallery in Bangalore is much more. Not only because the selection of vintage prints introduces the viewer to a bygone India but also because the man behind the lens was the incredible Sunil Janah. The Assam-born photographer documented some of the most seminal events between 1940 and 1960 — the Bengal famine, the freedom struggle, Partition, tribal studies… yet we don’t know much about him. The celebrated American photographer Margaret Bourke-White asked for Janah to accompany her to document the famine in Andhra Pradesh and Mysore for Life magazine. P.C. Joshi, a leading figure of India’s communist movement, asked Janah to accompany him to the famine-stricken Bengal in 1943. His graphic images of heaps of skeletons and a dog devouring human flesh shook everyone.
By the end-1960s, Janah, a much-feted photographer, had become a recluse. Since his vintage prints were not seen in India for a long time and certainly not in totality, many of the younger generation of photographers grew up not knowing about him. Ram Rahman curated a mammoth retrospective of his works in New York in 1998. Janah lived in Berkeley and died there at the age of 94 in 2013. He left his collection of negatives and prints with his son in the U.S.
In 2014, Rahman curated an exhibition with as many as 100 of Janah’s vintage prints culled from the private collection of Vijay Aggarwal. Asked how he acquired this collection, Aggarwal says, “I wasn’t looking for Janah specially, but a dealer offered it to me. I bought it immediately as the photos appealed to me contextually, aesthetically and culturally. I hadn’t known who Sunil Janah was at that time. They went to the archive (the Swaraj Art Archive) and I forgot about it. When my collection was being archived they resurfaced and I realised their importance. Today I am proud that, because of my gut feeling, we have such a large collection of Sunil Janah’s in my collection.”
The exhibition at Tasveer is a smaller version of the same show but still relevant. “Janah’s works probably hadn’t been seen in the South earlier and that’s what made it even more interesting,” says Rahman.
Rahman had known the photographer through his grandmother and mother Ragini Devi and Indrani Rahman, whose portraits Janah had shot. “The Swaraj Collection turned out to be a revelation. He didn’t make prints of every photograph because he hardly sold or exhibited his work and also making prints was very expensive,” explains Ram who selected rare frames of tribal communities, industrial photographs and dancers. Though his vast oeuvre included political photos from his Communist Party days — he was the official photographer of the CPI and shot its meetings and all other activities — the Swaraj Collection does not have those images.
The tribals and peasants are not indigent in Janah’s photographs. They are dignified and pose naturally for him. There is a photograph of a bare-breasted peasant sowing in Malabar, which appeared on the cover of People’s War in 1943. In another, a group of bare-breasted women work on a collective farm, and one has a young girl in Malappuram posing for Janah. “The reason for them being so unselfconscious is that they were familiar with Janah. He was no stranger. As a Communist Party worker, he was living with them, working for them and their rights,” says Rahman.
In his curatorial note, Rahman attributed some images to Janah’s first book of photographs, The Second Creature , which was published in Calcutta in 1948 and designed by Satyajit Ray, long before Ray became a film director. The note further said, “It is quite possible that the set in this collection were used to make the blocks for that book as the cropping is identical. I have hung these images and others from the same locations together in the right hand gallery.”
The show included prints from his trips to the Northeast in the 1950s and of industrial activity in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — setting up of steel plants and jute mills. All these photographs have made it to Sunil Janah: Photographs 1940-1960, Vintage Prints from the Swaraj Art Archive , a book by Rahman, which was also kept in the gallery to give a deeper insight into his life.
“The importance of vintage photographic prints has not been fully understood in our photo culture. These have not been retouched or restored in any manner and have been reproduced in the book with care to match the tones and colours of the originals — for the first time in Sunil Janah’s career. This trove of prints is therefore a revelation and gives viewers a unique chance to see the work of a major photographer in the way he intended it to be seen,” says Rahman.
Aggarwal agrees. “I strongly feel that now it is our responsibility to keep this priceless collection in proper safe condition and let all Sunil Janah lovers have access to them. That is why we had Ram Rahman do the first show and the book. We are looking forward to moving this show to NGMA Mumbai in July-August.”
