History is always the slave of greatness. It is there to
serve the master who is great or tipped to be one. Have you ever thought how we
recognize great masters from any field? We see them, understand them and even
wonder at them because they are the chosen people of history. And history is a
loyal but blind servant. It fails to see other people with talent and it is so
loyal to the great masters that it even casts aspersions over the other great
people visiting its household. This helps us to take all the modern masters
with a pinch of salt. I do not intend to say that their greatness is
questionable; but I do intend to say that they are history’s darlings. How can
I question the greatness of Picasso or Ram Kinkar Baij? But I should also say that
they were in the right place at the right time so that history could aid them
to cross over the turbulent waters of the river of Time.
(Indrani Rahman by Sunil Janah)
This line, ‘Right man in the right place at the right time’
comes repeatedly in Ram Rahman’s narrative on the three hundred odd photographs
by the late photographer Sunil Janah, secured by Delhi’s art collector, Vijaya
Kumar Aggarwal. This photography collection was kept in his Swaraj Art Archive
in Noida and it would have remained there for long had it not been found out by
chance by the photographer and activist, Ram Rahman. Though Aggarwal had not
recognised the beautiful woman in one of the photographs, which he thought of displaying
at his home, Ram Rahman could not have failed to recognize her. It was his
mother, Indrani Rahman, who was a well known dancer and social activist. This
chance finding took him to the collection of photographs and today it is a book
and an exhibition, which is currently on in Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern
Art.
(belly dancers by Sunil Janah)
Great photographers in India or in other words, the
photographers whom we consider vintage today were/are lucky men who had the
rare chance of handling a camera in their early days itself. In a vast country
like India, the number of people who could afford a camera around hundred and
fifty years back was almost nil. With the British came the proliferation of
photographic equipment and interest here and it was a serious occupation for
the early photographers like Raja Deen Dayal who commanded royal patronage for
their works. Royal and feudal assistance was a pre-requisite for pursuing
photography and only those people who could afford a camera and had the passion
for developing photographs could pursue a career in it. Though amateur
photography clubs were started by 1857 in India, the members were from the
aristocratic families. For women, it was a pastime and like the brown skinned
Indian servants assisted the men in hunting, aristocratic women were waited
upon by Indian servants in their photographic expeditions.
(Sunil Janah, Margaret Bourke-White and Rangekar in 1945)
Looking back, we could see the three sixty degree revolution
happened in the use of photography as a creative and communicative medium. The erstwhile
aristocratic, therefore hegemonic and hierarchic activity has now melted all
its socio-cultural and economic barriers and has come handy to anybody who
could afford to buy a mobile phone fitted with a camera. When Sunil Janah came
to the scene in 1930s and became active since 1940s there were not too many
photographic practitioners who involved in social work or politics. For Sunil
Janah, it was not just a chosen vocation but a mission given to him by one his
mentors, P.C. Joshi, leader of the undivided Communist Party of India. As a
literature student in the Presidency College in Calcutta, Sunil Janah was not
contemplating a career in photography when he was asked to document the Bengal
Famine in 1943. Janah left his studies half and took the plunge in political
activism as a photographer along with Chittoprasad Bhattacharya, the master
printmaker and illustrator of the time. Sunil Janah after his party work in
different places including Bombay and Delhi, left for Calcutta in late 1940s, disillusioned
by the Communist Party, only to be attracted to the nation building efforts of
India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He took up the UNO’s project to
photograph the tribes in the South East Asian countries.
(Book cover of Sunil Janah)
Sunil Janah is famous for his political photographs that
include the photographs taken during his communist days and the Nehruvian days.
But the present body of work falls in between, a period from 1940 to 1960s. As
I mentioned at the outset, this collection as a book and also an exhibition is
an occasion to problematise these works done by Janah. Here Janah does not come
across as a man who was really compassionate about his subjects as he had done
in his activist photographs. This view however does not intend to show Janah in
poor light. What makes me curious is Janah’s own choice of selecting,
publishing and exhibiting a major portion of these works in 1948 itself. In
1948, he published ‘Second Creature’, predominantly comprising of the pictures
of the semi-nude pictures of the Malabar women peasants (somehow he stumps
Simone de Beauvoir who published Second Sex in 1949). In 1993 he came out with
the ‘The Tribals of India’. Though there are other books on the works of Janah,
I would like to take these two books as a backdrop to discuss this body of
works currently curated and exhibited by Ram Rahman.
(photograph by Sunil Janah)
Sunil Janah was a privileged photographer on two counts. He
became a photographer because he had a camera and also had trained in making
photographic prints by the veteran photographer Shambhu Shaha. He decided to
leave his studies and plunge into photography because he had the blessing of
the party’s top leadership. Now, we cannot say that the Communist Party was a
rich party as we see today. It was a party which was still in struggle with the
Congress. As a party of the peasants and workers, the Communist artists were
looking the life and times of these works. Poverty was the bench mark and it
was a touchstone to test the humanism of any activist. Janah went headlong in
documenting poverty and it was not just a documentation but loaded with
ideological issues including international diplomacy and war time positioning
of the party. Interestingly, immediately after the Bengal Famine, Janah seems
to have been deputed to Kerala, especially in Malabar which was still a part of
Madras Presidency, where he started documenting the peasant women.
(Malabar -peasant women by Sunil Janah)
The semi clad women with their upper torso completely
exposed to the gaze of the photographer as well as the onlooker, could easily
be seen through a feminist’s eyes and accused the artist of making incursions
into their ‘bodies’. Of course there is an aspect of male gaze in these
photographs but we have to ask which photograph is not the result of a gaze,
male, female or the third gender. A photograph is the product of a gaze and
there is no doubt about it. However, when we look at these works of Janah, we
come to know that the artist was facing a no alternative situation on the one
hand and an extremely enjoyable scene on the other. There was no alternative
because the women peasants in Malabar (or women in Kerala in general) were not
allowed to wear blouses or anything that covered their upper bodies. For a
peasant, whether male or female a loin cloth was the maximum dress allowed by
the society. The feudal systems operational in those days did not allow women
to wear upper clothes. It was the privilege of the land lord to enjoy their ‘breasts’.
Only women from the Brahmin castes were allowed to cover their upper bodies. In
Malabar, all the lower castes including the Nairs were not allowed to cover
their breasts. From 19th century to 1960s there were social
struggles to gain right for women to cover their breasts. There used to be tax
(mulakkaram- breast tax) imposed upon those who wore upper garments.
(Malabar peasant by Sunil Janah)
Seen against this backdrop, we understand that Sunil Janah
was not intentionally looking at the bare breasted women for the pleasure of
gaze. However, we feel the kind of relief that Janah enjoyed after documenting
the pathetic scenes in Bengal famine for a long time. This part of Malabar was
a welcoming respite for Janah and he seems to have revelled in this new found
land of bare breasted beauties. There are two pictures that I would like to
bring in for discussion because Janah makes this constant effort to edit his
pictures differently, with and without certain figures, which in fact give away
the ‘male’ in Janah. He more or less becomes Gaugin in Tahiti, as rightly
pointed out by Ram Rahman (but in a different sense). In one of the pictures we
see a group of women in their natural habitat of work. There are two women on
the left side of the frame and they are fully clad in a ‘modern way’. But the
gaze is upon the semi clad woman turning her gaze towards her right, showing no
interest in photography. In another print, Janah edits the well dressed women
on the left and focus is given completely on the semi clad woman who just does
not counter gaze at the photographer. In another photograph, Janah edits the
background of Kerala out and juxtaposes the nude figure with an exotic
landscape and takes a final print. Here the intention of the artist is pretty
much clear; more than documenting the peasant women in a communist party context,
here we see a young man thoroughly enjoying the platter of breasts spread out
before him. Communist affiliation in fact does not reduce anybody’s male
tendencies.
(Santal boys by Sunil Janah)
Let’s take these women who are mostly willing subjects. They
do not have any problem in posing semi naked because they are semi naked in
their normal life. There is no other point of reference for them to feel
ashamed of their semi nudity. The women who are clad in the same frame are from
the Muslim community and they are as good as outcastes. The dresses that they wear
are an aberration as far as the semi naked women are concerned. It is not that
they peasants are unaware of the struggles around breasts and blouses going on
in their land. We cannot write out the influence of communism amongst the working
class and Malabar region remains to be one of the strong holds of the communist
party even today. But what interests me is their happy poses, which is not
intimidated by the presence of the man with a camera. Here the tension of the
photographer is palpable as he monumentalize their presence as in the posters
from Soviet Union (the reason Ram Rahman cites as his familiarity with the
films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, the legendary film makers in the
revolutionary Russia), with their upturned noses and nipples; Janah struggles
to hold the camera straight whereas the girls do not even acknowledges his
greatness. They are natural. Here is the confrontation of two cultures; one is
thoroughly informed of the urban-rural divide and ideology pertaining to
male-female participation in the social progress, and the nature which is yet
reluctant to receive that culture.
(Bengal Famine by Sunil Janah)
Janah’s interest in working with the semi clad women
continues to the point of obsession when he takes of the United National project to document tribals and also develops an anthropological interest in
documenting the tribals in India itself. His association with the American photographer,
Margarete Bourke –White who was in India for a Life Magazine assignment in 1945
and his sharing of her flash lights have become a part of the lore of both
the photographers. But I would like to say that even if Janah was a communist
to begin with, being a photographer he always stood at the side of power. His disillusionment
with the Communist party led him to Nehru’s ‘progressive’ measures and he went
on to photograph factories and dams. Was it simply a career move? Janah, as an
artist, after the communist days, decided to travel with the dominant and the
powerful. His experience in documenting the famine and the national leaders as
well as common peasants came handy in getting assignments not only from the government
of India but also from the United Nations and other international agencies.
Janah was a man in the right place at the right time. The greatness of his
photography is assisted by history. He became the darling of history because
there were not too many to pursue the same career path at that time.
(work by Sunil Janah)
I would like to close this essay with the following
questions that came to my mind while going through the works of Sunil Janah and
curated by Ram Rahman. Had there been more photographers at that time could
Janah become a celebrated photographer as we see today? Had he not been given
assignments by various powerful national and international agencies, what could
have been his works in those years? Hasn’t his communist affiliation and the
works that he had done between 1940 and 1950 justified the later works which
are fine documents but really not great photographs? The more I look at the
works of Janah’s the more I become aware of his purism which he
himself had accepted. What he aspired for was a clean photograph not a
photograph that showed various moods within a picture. His narrative was
already set and it was authorial in nature. The later works of his seem to be
of less significance for critical views and their significance would be justified
by the author’s name that goes with them.
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