Sunil Janah: Photographing a Modern Nation

The third of three articles on photographer Sunil Janah Read the previous post here Guest Author: Sourajit Saha On Nehru’s death in 1964, the New York Times referred to the first Prime Minister of India as ‘the maker of modern India’.1 Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, a central figure of India’s Independence movement, was inspired by socialist ideas […]

Sunil Janah: Photographing People

The second of three articles on photographer Sunil Janah Read the previous post here Guest Author: Sourajit Saha Ethnographic studies came hand in hand with colonialism in India. Many examples can be found in colonial art, sometimes even commissioned by the British, of the ethnographic studies of contemporary Indians in the 18th and 19th centuries. […]

Representing the Third World: Social Consciousness in the Photography of Sunil Janah

The first of three articles on photographer Sunil Janah Guest Author: Sourajit Saha Very few have photographed the country as Sunil Janah did. He was a mere college student, an active member of the Student Federation, when P.C. Joshi, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), visited Calcutta and offered Janah, ‘Come […]

Cinema for Change: Shyam Benegal’s Rural Trilogy

‘Through my films I can say, “Here is the world, and here are the possibilities we have,”’ – perhaps it is the existence of these possibilities that made Shyam Benegal the bearer of the winds of change in Indian cinema. There were filmmakers before him working independent of mainstream cinema, experimenting with different styles of […]

The Other Lens

An account of some of the most prominent photographer characters in Indian cinema