The person who photographed India’s soul: Legendary photojournalist Raghu Rai dies at 83 | India Information
4 min learnUp to date: Apr 26, 2026 09:37 AM IST
Raghu Rai’s foray into images was reasonably serendipitous. A civil engineer who was on knowledgeable break, it was throughout a go to to his brother, photographer S Paul, in Delhi within the Sixties that Rai was launched to the nuances of the medium. Accompanying a buddy to a village in Haryana, he took what was amongst his first pictures: a donkey gazing straight into the digital camera. Impressed by the picture, Paul despatched it to The Occasions in London, the place it was revealed, incomes Rai not simply prize cash but additionally extra considerably a profession in images that was to stick with him till he died in Delhi on April 26. He was 83.
Tenacious, observant and deeply curious, Rai instilled life into each {photograph} that he took and captured the heartbeat of the nation. “Greater than knowledgeable photographer, I turned an explorer of life,” he had said in an interview to The Indian Categorical in 2024. Although that life has now ended, the moments he recorded will stay perpetually within the type of his wealthy archive that spans from photojournalism to documentation and portraits of a few of the most recognised figures from throughout completely different fields, politics to tradition.
Considered one of India’s foremost photographers, Rai was additionally a photojournalist for over 5 a long time. He carried his intuitive spirit to the completely different newsrooms that he was a part of. Within the 2024 interview, he famous, “If accountable journalism is the primary draft of historical past, then photojournalism is the primary proof of that historical past being lived. The sanctity of my occupation requires that the images go into the depths of every day life of individuals’s feelings and their responses to conditions and seize that in any given time or area. I’m not right here to make fairly photos or documentary photos that simply impart info.”
In 1977, Raghu Rai turned the nation’s first photographer to be invited to hitch Magnum Pictures upon the nomination by legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
So throughout seven a long time, the 1972 Padma Shri awardee lined a spectrum of the nation’s historical past, together with pictures of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in Amritsar’s Golden Temple advanced shortly earlier than Operation Blue Star in 1984. A few of his most enduring pictures additionally got here from the location of the Bhopal Fuel Tragedy and that of refugees through the Bangladesh Liberation Warfare in 1971. A photojournalist through the Emergencyhe discovered aways to work across the censorship. Recalling these years, in a 2025 interview to The Indian Categorical he said, “There have been a number of pictures that couldn’t be revealed, together with that of political leaders who had been arrested and protesters. We devised methods to depict actuality, with symbolic representations.”
Overlaying the Emergency: The symbolic picture that advised the story of the Emergency
In 1977, he additionally turned the nation’s first photographer to be invited to hitch Magnum Pictures upon the nomination by legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had seen his pictures at a Paris exhibition in 1971. The latter’s humanist method echoed in Rai’s personal observe, from his frames of the bustling streets of Previous Delhi to the ghats of Ganga, landscapes throughout terrains and the Mahakumbh.
Indira Gandhi in her dinning room, Delhi 1971 (Credit score: Raghu Rai & PHOTOINK)
Additionally testomony to his inclination to introspect and archive are his a number of books, together with Delhi, Raghu Rai’s India, Picturing Time and Tibet in Exile. Raghu Rai: Folks (2016), then again, introduced collectively his most interesting portraits, from the nameless to the well-recognised, together with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan, Dalai Lama, Roman Catholic nun Mom Teresa and movie personalities Satyajit Ray and Aparna Sen.
Mom Teresa at her residence, Seventies (Credit score: Raghu Rai & PHOTOINK)
Even in his later years, Rai continued to {photograph} with the identical devotion that marked his foray onto changing into one of the crucial prolific visible chroniclers of latest India.
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