Raghu Rai, one of the defining photographers of South Asia, died in New Delhi on April 26 after battling cancer. He was 83. To write about him now is to come to terms with the passing of a certain photographic weather. Rai belonged to a generation for whom the camera was a witness to the unfinished project of nation building.
His unique vision was forged through photojournalism.
Born in 1942 in Jhang, Rai came from a family marked by Partition. His elder brother photographer S Paul, introduced him to the medium. Rai joined The Statesman in 1966, later worked with Sunday, and then India Today, where he shaped the magazine’s formative years. The newsroom gave him speed, access, proximity, and importantly a front row seat to history unfolding.
For photographer Prashant Panjiar, whom Rai would later bring into India Today’s photo department, that grammar was formative. When Panjiar’s photographs of the anti-dacoit crackdown in the early 1980s, under the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh VP Singh, reached India Today, Rai called him in. “He took me to the darkroom and made the prints himself,” Panjiar recalls. “Here was Raghu Rai whose photography dominated the Indian landscape for decades making prints for a nobody.” Rai’s authority was made print by print in that magazine darkroom where loud Hindustani classical music always played in the background.
One barely ever saw Raghu Rai in public without a camera. At openings, talks, photo festivals, exhibition corridors, Rai seemed unable, or perhaps unwilling, to separate himself from the instrument. He had once wanted to be a musician, but the camera became the instrument he finally settled on.
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Few photographers moved so instinctively between state power and public unrest.
Former PM Indira Gandhi often appeared in Rai’s photographs as power caught in its own choreography. Yet he also returned her to a human scale: in his frames, she was tired, amused, guarded, vulnerable, captured in the millisecond of his camera’s shutter. Social activist and freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan, by contrast, was always in motion. In Rai’s photographs, we see him in Bihar, amongst agitating students and bruised public faith. These photographs speak of a time when leaders were still met with critical eyes, before image management turned the camera into a prop and another accessory of power.
Bangladesh and Bhopal remain two poles of Rai’s moral imagination. In 1971, he photographed refugees, hunger and displacement during the Indo-Pakistan war for the liberation of Bangladesh for which he received the Padma Shri. In 1984, after the Bhopal Union Carbide gas leak, he entered a city altered by corporate negligence. As Panjiar put it, Pablo Bartholomew’s colour image of the same burial travelled globally and won World Press Photo of the Year, but Rai’s black and white photograph, Burial of an Unknown Child, “that small face half buried in mud”, “entered Indias visual consciousness,” Panjiar said.
“We have lost the great Raghu Rai. Widely considered the father of Indian photography, Raghu was a brilliant photographer… he was also incredibly wise and taught me much about how the camera and the heart work together,” said Bill Shapiro, former editor-in-chief of LIFE magazine. Shapiro interviewed Rai and his daughter, Avani, for Oprah Daily in 2022.
In 2024, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi held a retrospective of Rai’s works titled, A Thousand Lives: Photographs from 1965–2005. It gathered forty years of analogue work, and made clear that Rai had not merely photographed India for more than five decades, but built an India through photography: crowd and stain, procession and bureaucracy, wound and festival, faith and theatre. In that show, one could sense what Henri Cartier Bresson, often positioned as a father of modern photography, must have recognised when he nominated Rai to Magnum Photos, which Rai joined as an associate in 1977.
Most visual artists debate about whether Rai inherited Bresson’s famed ‘decisive moment’. It is, rather, what he did to it that matters. Bresson’s moment was the knife’s edge of image composition, its geometry, grace, chance, and the world briefly resolving itself. Rai, on the other hand, translated it into an Indian register where the moment remained suspended, and rarely, if ever, resolved itself. Mother Teresa asleep among her beloved. The Dalai Lama watching the Mahabharata on TV. Photojournalist Kaushik Ramaswamy remembers Rai’s photograph of Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur, dying of lung cancer, demanding a last cigarette from his son.
Compared to another photography stalwart Raghubir Singh (born the same year as Rai, in 1942, Singh died in 1999), who made colour a philosophical argument for India, in Rai’s panoramic imagination, ordinary life enlarged until it became almost civilisational. “Raghu Rai was, at heart, a romantic,” Panjiar said. “He saw his images on an epic scale, almost as extensions of mythology and the Indian epics.” Rai once told photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, Panjiar remembered, “We are the same: you, in Brazil, me in India.” His words were of an artist whose images has dominated India’s visual memory for decades and who had come to trust the scale of his own eye. Across more than fifty years, he moved from 35mm black-and-white reportage to panoramic arrangements, from colour analogue to digital, from press image to photobook.
To mourn Rai is to mourn a certain faith in photography, a belief that one could walk into the street with a camera and return with evidence, contradiction, mystery, and sometimes grace. Rai’s generation understood that the photograph was not meant to flatter history, but to trouble it. Rai’s India arrived through event, velocity, contact.
Rai is survived by his wife, Gurmeet, son Nitin, daughters Lagan, Avani and Purvai.
(Akshay Mahajan is an artist, photographer and writer based in India)
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