To outsiders, and for this journalist from Delhi, photographer-filmmaker Tarun Bhartiya was the key to open up a certain Meghalaya removed from tourism brochures—to know that there were people who wanted to be Christians on their own terms; the indirect pressure towards an indigenisation of the Khasi church from non-Christian Khasis and a Christian revivalism as a fallout; that women theologians wanted the right to be ordained pastors.
Bhartiya also spotlighted Thomas Jones, a Welsh missionary, who rebelled against the East India Company and sided with the local population, as a reason why, unlike in other parts of India, in Meghalaya, the missionary is not a dirty word…. Bhartiya was not just interested in the good fights. His camera picked a side.
Bhartiya spent his childhood in Shillong, he went to college and did his masters in Delhi and worked with NDTV in its initial years. Married into a Khasi family, he died last January at his home in Shillong. C., his first photobook made from work of several decades, is now available at bookshops. It takes its cues from the eponymous exhibition that he had mounted at the National Photo Festival in Ahmedabad just weeks before he died of a sudden heart attack.
Book of rebels
Published by Yaarbal Books, Em. No. Nahi. is 205-pager structured like a journal through which Bhartiya speaks. Its images are punctuated by field notes, things he observed, often from within a moving vehicle.
Sitting within these texts and shards of poetry by Bhartiya and other fellow-travellers, are photographs of people who have said ‘em’ meaning ‘no’ (in Khasi) or a provisional ‘yes’.
There is here the late Kong Spillity Lyngdoh Langrin, then 95, the matriarch of Domiasiat village in the West Khasi Hills who refused to allow uranium to be mined on her land; protestors at Mynsang against moves to dam the Umngot river; Angela Rangad, activist and Bhartiya’s partner, addressing a gathering; and voters queuing up for roads and development that had been used as a bait for holding elections in the West Khasi Hills.
“In the Afterword, Angela writes about all the things that Tarun sought to shoot in order to suggest what people in the region were up against. Electoral politics included,” says Sanjay Kak, filmmaker and editor, Yaarbal Books.
Bhartiya directed over 20 documentaries and edited films such as Jashn-e-Azadi (2007)—it was Kak’s first collaboration with him as director—and The Last Train in Nepal (2015), the latter winning the Royal Television Society (UK) Award for Best Director. He was awarded a National Film Award for his work as film editor for the 2009 film In Camera, Diaries of a Documentary Cameraman which he returned in 2015 to protest "state oppression". He was also a founding member of Thma U Rangli-Juki (TUR), a collective, and the web magazine Raiot.
Who is afraid of Kong Spellity?
This month, Meghalaya was in the news for an explosion that killed 30 at an illegal rat-hole coal mine, one among many run by the coal mafia in the region, in the East Jaintia Hills district; the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had imposed a ban on rat-hole mining in Meghalaya in 2014.
Bhartiya’s stark photography and the spirit of Kong Spellity that binds the other photo stories in the book, remind us that there are other threats to people’s rights over land and health in the region. According to a 2025 Moneycontrol report, India is targeting a 10-fold increase in nuclear power capacity by 2047, uranium being crucial for fuelling nuclear reactors. The spectre of uranium exploration and mining are still the big scares in Meghalaya, one of the three states besides Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand with high uranium deposits.
Rangad writes in the book: “The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, through a new office memorandum, exempts the mining of uranium and other critical minerals from the purview of Environment Impact Assessment. This means people will not be consulted and public hearings will not be held any more.”
Building collective memory
The two Kong Spellity photographs in the book — she was offered Rs 1.5 crore annually in the early ’80s for a 30-year lease by Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL) which she refused after UCIL labourers exploring for uranium in the area told her about the ill-effects it had on their health — and the photograph of her funeral, shows Bhartiya’s capture of the timelessness of her resistance with newer feet on the ground.
“In some ways it was in her passing that the power around her refusal really began to be acknowledged, to grow,” says Kak.
The book also has Bhartiya’s laconic humour on how he conned his way into an ‘exposure trip’ by name-dropping Tagore to a UCIL technocrat, who happened to be Bengali. “I haven’t talked so much Tagore in life. So, one day, I asked him about uranium mining displacing people. He looked at me amazed. What displacement? We will pay them, even make houses for them, give some of them salaried employment. They will become ‘reachable’. Anyway, they are such unproductive people, they may have land but they don’t know the value of that land….”
Bhartiya’s image-making on the protest movements in Meghalaya, and in other parts of India, and, especially, on Kong Spellity, helped build collective memory, spread the word, and mobilise for activism on these issues.
Spreading the word
Was Spellity’s resistance ‘successful’? What is the importance of a book like this by Bhartiya for today’s generation, not just in Meghalaya but anywhere in India or in the world?
“In politics, in resistance, there are no easy binaries of success and failure: did the movement in the Narmada valley fail for example, even if the Sardar Sarovar Dam did get completed? I don’t think so,” says Kak. “I can see that even after two decades, the uranium is still in the ground in the Khasi hills. Kong Spellity’s children are still sticking to their guns, although with great difficulty…. That is the lesson that goes out to the new generation in Meghalaya—and in the world—and I hope Tarun’s images help in reinforcing that idea of standing up, of refusing to buckle down.”