Newspaper articles often provide their own instigations. Readers are full of questions. They often ask me – you read the text the way you read the photograph. Is photograph merely a complimentary way of looking at a text or an alternative way of reading realities? How objective is a photograph? What is a relation of a photograph as a symbolic and technical act to democracy?
These were questions I myself had when I met the legendary photographer, Raghu Rai. Raghu Rai’s life is covered by Rachna Singh in a recent biography. But mine is more a set of informal conversations I had with the photographer as philosopher.
There is an iconic exuberance about the man. He sometimes becomes the question. One sensed it first around the stories about his first famous photographs. He photographed a village donkey. The donkey insisted on performing for the crowd. Raghu Rai insisted on outperforming the donkey as both ran around the village. There was a double animation which gave a separate sense of excitement to the picture. I asked Raghu Rai occasional questions on how he constructed his photography.
For Raghu Rai, technology cannot be constructed along conventional lines. A lot of technology is still craft. A lot of the craft still embodies the sacred. And Raghu Rai’s philosophy and craft of photography still challenges the dualism of objective and subjective; sacred and secular in current day photography.
For Raghu Rai, secularism is an empty word. Photography is a rite of passage. A repeated initiation into authenticity. Each picture surprising the one before. His use of language is remarkable. For him democracy does not begin with representation and elections. It begins with a different kind of vocabulary. For Rai, democracy cannot survive without grace. And secularism without grace is empty. Democracy needs the sacred, to create a sense of possibilities and limits. The Guru becomes an essential creature and creator to this imagination. The words he uses are eternity, grace and play which goes beyond market calculations and looks for aesthetics and ethics of time. The example he repeatedly gives is that of the Dalai Lama.
At one level in a political sense, Dalai Lama is marginal to India. He is the eternal refugee but at another level the Dalai Lama gives India a sense of grace. Rai’s relation with Dalai Lama explains it all. At one level he has all the seriousness and commitment of an initiate. At another he is a child playing in a new and wonderful world. Dalai Lama adds to politics more than power and sovereignty. He can crack jokes about gigantism of China only in a way a country like Tibet can.
Dalai Lama speaks the language of compassion and courage. Raghu Rai’s photography is an attempt to capture this almost inimitable act. Carisma and the sacred are difficult things to capture. Photography seeks not just the empirical but the undefinable. It is in seeking the undefinable language that photography becomes a philosophical act. Raghu Rai has almost a child like relation to the Dalai Lama. His photography was almost like a child’s crusade, a trusteeship that Dalai Lama had given him and entrusted him to preserve the memories of Tibet.
One sees this again in Raghu Rai’s relationship with mother Teresa. The sacred becomes one of the great challenges of photography. Saintliness is not what you capture through ornamentation but a deep sense of dignity and compassion. Mother Teresa holding an old man bereft of everything captures the compassion and the companionship which is difficult to describe. In capturing Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa via major anthologies, Raghu Rai hopes to recapture the outlines of photography as a public act. In fact the world public acquires a different magic. The public allows characters like marginals and migrants which democracy hardly permits. Secondly, even if photography is technology which claims to be empirical and objective, it captures the sense of I, thou relationship with subject. One sees it best in his pictures on Bhopal. He takes the picture of a child discarded in the waste bin where children are treated like waste on an assembly line. Raghu Rai’s pictures showed that Bhopal created the obscenity of the body and a condition that needed to be redeemed.
For Rai, the word Public is sacrosanct. Public allows for ritual, testimony, spaces, and enactment of memory that makes the city come alive. The photographer becomes the trustee, the troubadour, the storyteller of public as sociological space. In a sense Raghu Rai’s work ranks as best of democratic theory in showing how photography as a democratic act can become symbolically significant in creating the language of the self and the symbolism. Rai’s work becomes unique. The newspaper in his hands is not a banal act of recording. It is testament, testimony, testimonial to the current workings of life.