Raghu Rai (1942-2026): A chronicler of the pulse of India

At the India Art Fair earlier this year, a selection of Raghu Rai’s photographs took centrestage at PHOTOINK’s booth. The black-and-white imagery hailed from the series Confessions of a Wall, shot between 1973 and 1977. The photos looked at the wall, not just as a physical demarcation between the public and the private realms, but also as a backdrop to the way life in the city unfolds and bodies respond to space and situations. With the subjects often looking straight into the camera, reaching out to you across time, you get an immediate sense of their response to the challenges of urban life. Some images are contemplative and poignant, others are playful.

A particularly interesting scene unfolds in a photo studio complete with its props and sets. A studio photographer is busy getting two wary men comfortable for their portraits. A third man, seated a little away from this scene, looks straight into Rai’s camera and smiles. A single image records such diverse responses to the act of being photographed. In another photo, the wall is scribbled with ways of achieving aatma shanti (inner peace) even as people, who have clearly spent the night on the footpath, fold their bedding to go about their daily chores and a couple of boys run across spinning a tyre. A sense of resignation and search for a moment of joy coexist in a single frame. For nearly seven decades, Rai chronicled the pulse of India, capturing the zeitgeist of everyday life. He passed away earlier today at the age of 83 in the Capital.

Rai once famously said, “A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.” His imagery wasn’t just confined to life on the street. Rather his portraiture extended to the pulse of the moment in politics and culture, becoming important visual repositories of the time. In his career, he extensively photographed key personalities such as the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi with her family, and more. Especially striking is his image of the Dalai Lama watching the Mahabharat on Doordarshan in Dharamshala in 1988, showing a small slice of daily life of the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Some of his other evocative portraits include those of classical music maestros such as Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Bismillah Khan and M.S. Subbulakshmi, captured on camera during their most intense and candid moments. In the new book, Portrait of an Artist by Rohit Chawla, published by Mapin and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Rai spoke about his approach to portraiture. “In approaching your subject, you have to be impartial because the portrait has to reflect the moment, the experience of the person, the energy of the person in any given time. But if you carry your own mental baggage of the subject, that baggage keeps making noise. As a documentary photographer, you need to keep your palette clean and embrace the moment.”

A recipient of the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honours in India, Rai’s foray into photography was incidental. Trained as a civil engineer, he was introduced to the medium during a visit to his brother, S. Paul, in Delhi. From thereon there was no turning back, and at the age of 23 he started his career as a photojournalist with the Statesman. The images that he took are now important documentations of some of the key moments of India’s post-independence history—take, for instance, images from the tragedy following the explosion in 1984 of the Union Carbide's pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal. For Greenpeace, he has completed an in-depth documentary project on the chemical disaster and its ongoing effects on the lives of gas victims. Rai also documented the lives of refugees during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. His exhibition at Gallery Delpire in Paris brought Rai to the notice of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who nominated Rai to Magnum Photos.

Over time, exhibitions have tried to evoke lesser-known aspects of the man behind the craft. A 2024-show, Raghu Rai: A Thousand Lives (Photographs from 1965-2005), organised by the KNMA and PHOTOINK, looked at the pre-digital phase of his career, when he used analog/film photography. The series on display highlighted a different facet to his “intense photographic engagement with the world”. However, digital remained his favourite medium. In an interview for Portrait of an Artist, Rai talked extensively about his partiality to the wide angle lens and how digital freed photographers from the tyranny of film. “The ability to see the image instantly is half the magic… But for me the purpose of photography is still to capture the time we live in, otherwise painters are there, writers are there — anybody can do anything with a subject,” he said.

For Rai, photography was not just a vocation but “a prayer”. In his 2024-interview to Lounge, he talked about how you needed to invest your body and soul into every shot. “It’s like what they say, kan kan mein bhagwan hain (god is in every cell)”, he said. “What it really means is that you cannot ignore anything. There is something about everything—if you can connect with that, toh tab darshan hoga (that’s when you see god)”.