‘Sunil Janah’s Photographic Eye is Very, Very Powerful’

Photo: Nayan Shah

A blow-up of People’s War, the journal of the Communist Party of India, dated 24 September 1944, dominates the ground-floor display at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. The front page bears an English translation of an Urdu poem by Kaifi Azmi addressed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. The poem is solemn, but the accompanying pictures of villagers and farm workers taken by photojournalist Sunil Janah are buoyant.

The image is part of Sunil Janah: Vintage Photographs 1940-1960, curated by photographer Ram Rahman. This rare collection of prints of three bodies of Janah’s work—of industrial workers, dancers and the tribal and peasant population—bypasses most of his political portraits.

“These were never meant for exhibition," said Rahman. “These are small (prints) because they were meant for reproduction and printing in books. He would never have shown these in the 1940s."

Edited excerpts from an interview:

Sunil Janah is synonymous with bleak pictures of the Bengal famine that captured the world’s attention. Yet, the photographs around us are marked by cheer and optimism. Can you tell us how these pictures were discovered?

The pictures have been curated from the (Delhi-based) Swaraj Art Archive collection. Vijay Aggarwal, who runs the archive, picked them up in an envelope from an American gallerist of Indian origin, without knowing too much about Sunil Janah—he was interested in Bengal and was buying Bengal School works.

When he told me about the collection, about 300 photographs, I didn’t believe (him), because Janah never sold or gave away his work. I was very reluctant to even go see him. When I walked into his building, the first picture I saw was of my mother, (dancer) Indrani Rahman. I turned the corner and also found my grandmother (dancer Ragini Devi) on another wall. Both of them were shot by Janah.

We realized that this entire lot of photographs was either from the designer or the publisher of Janah’s first book, The Second Creature (1949). The designer of the book was (filmmaker) Satyajit Ray, and one of the pictures in the collection is a hand-drawn sketch of a cover that I am sure was done by Ray.

The lower section (of the gallery) has pictures from Janah’s Communist Party of India days in Mumbai. He was brought here from Bengal by P.C. Joshi (the party’s first general secretary), and lived in the commune in Andheri—that’s where his darkroom was and that’s where many of these pictures were printed. But they have never been shown in Mumbai; so in a way, this is a homecoming.

Had he already become internationally famous by this time?

Yes. His pictures of the Bengal famine, published in People’s War, shot him to international renown. So, he started travelling with Margaret Bourke-White from Life magazine. She used her magazine funds to help these commies do their own work.

Bourke-White had a bulb flash, but Janah didn’t have one. So, they set up this very unusual working system where he would stand close to her and open the shutter and she would fire the flash and that would expose his pictures too.

When he was expelled from the party around 1947-48, Janah went back to Calcutta, set up a photo studio and began to shoot industry. That’s when all the new industries, which Nehru called “the temples of modern India"—the steel plants, the coal mines, the jute mills—were being set up in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar, where all the mineral wealth is.

But he continued his work on the tribals and peasants because he had a great empathy for them. Sometimes he would travel with anthropologist Verrier Elwin, sometimes on his own. He would stay there for a while, become friends with the villagers.

You have called Janah a ‘chronicler of the Nehruvian era’. You are not just using ‘Nehruvian’ to describe the time period, but also some of the qualities his pictures are endowed with.

Well, it was a time when the peasant and the worker were extolled as the builders of new India. They were heroized by the Bombay films and IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) plays of that time.

Now, the whole notion of labour is linked with unrest and pollution. These pictures are all linked with Nehru’s vision of building a new India and they were neither exotic nor exploitative. For instance, look at some of the women in the portraits and their incredible sense of self and style.

Of course Janah’s subjects were important to him, but most conversation around his pictures tends to focus only on the subject and not enough on the technical and artistic aspects of his style. Tell us something about that. What was the ‘Janah finish’, for instance?

His photographic eye is very, very powerful. He spoke about how conscious he was of the aesthetic and the prints he made. It didn’t matter what the subject or genre was; he was just making a beautiful print.

There is a very strong visual aesthetic at play; there is a great richness of surface; there are a variety of tones. He was very keen on the actual surface of the print, even when he was taking mundane pictures of, say, a party meeting. That was the Janah finish.