KOLKATA: Raghu Rai’s photography immortalized a spectrum of Bengal’s genius, most notably Satyajit Ray, whom he called Dadu, not Dada, with the admiration one reserves for a guru. His portraits of Ray, alongside those of Saint Teresa, stand at the heart of his Bengal legacy that will be cherished after his demise on Sunday. In black and white, he summoned grey, light, and shadow with grave precision, drawing from the faces of Pt Ravi Shankar, Ustad Vilayat Khan, Sharmila Tagore, Aparna Sen, and Moonmoon Sen their inward eloquence. In the meditative silence of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan at riyaaz, and in the unyielding fire of Mahasweta Devi, Rai created a visual map of Bengal’s cultural giants.The stories behind some of his portraits were as compelling as the images themselves. He had been photographing Mother Teresa from the early 1970s for five decades and was also present during her canonization ceremony at the Vatican. One story suggests the Mother initially refused him prayer photographs, fearing cameras would disturb the sisters. Rai, heartbroken yet persistent, said that he saw Jesus in her while she prayed and longed for that frame to complete his story. Moved by his plea, she allowed him one silent morning session. The result was her iconic photograph. “It isn’t very hard to make photographs appear beautiful or mysterious. But that’s never enough. Inside his world of images, you can see him moving with a restless, childlike curiosity. He stood many before the defining moments of the past several decades in India, and his photographs carried that quiet certainty of someone who knew, instinctively, what he was doing. His relationship with photography was deeply spiritual. He engaged with the medium with a certain faith and velocity like no one else.” said photographer and filmmaker Ronny Sen.In the late 1970s, when Ray and Rai judged ITC’s Made for Each Other contest, Ray praised one of his photograph: a woman hauling a cart. Rai, who was a big admirer of Ray’s ‘Jalsaghar’ calling it ‘poetry on celluloid’, was tongue-tied to hear his hero describing it as “powerful”. In the 1980s, Rai on an official assignment for India Today filmed Ray on the sets of ‘Ghare Baire,’ at his Bishop Lefroy Road residence, and at Outram Ghat on Dashami. In the fading light, Rai caught Ray leaning against the parapet, watching the immersion, and sharing candid moments with street children. Yet all 78 rolls shot in Kolkata were underexposed. Only during the pandemic were they digitally restored. From them emerged ‘Satyajit Ray’ — a definitive record of Ray, seen away from the familiar world that had made him monumental.Interestingly, both Rai and Nemai Ghosh photographed Ray on the sets of ‘Ghare Baire’. Ina Puri, who has worked closely with both, said, “With Nemai-da, there was a sense of reverence. He was almost awe-struck. His photos of Manik-da were brilliantly studied compositions from a distance. Raghu’s lens, in contrast, brought out the camaraderie. Raghu went for the candid shots of Manik-da. He had him sprawled on the bed with his head thrown back. There was affection, friendship, bonhomie and a sense of addabaji that is evident between two men.”Another much-discussed photograph is of Aparna Sen. After a long, fruitless session spent searching for the right frame, Rai finally told her he was abandoning the project. In that unguarded instant, Rai caught Sen when she had dropped her head onto the table and burst into laughter. “He had his signature point of vision. In his portrait photography, he could capture moments which most of us missed or didn’t even consider shooting. An Aparna Sen’s portrait is proof of that. He not only chose the right angle but also the right moment,” said photographer Sanjeet Chowdhury.One of his quieter yet unforgettable portraits unfolds in a modest room in Maihar, where photographs of Tagore and Swami Vivekananda hang on the walls, and a tiny fan sits hidden beneath a table. “My guru, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, is seated on a bed with his sarod, his eyes gazing out of the window. The portrait is emblematic of his sublime essence,” remembered Pt Tejendra Narayan Majumdar. Rai spoke with deep affection of photographing the icon there, and later at his home in California. He remembered the main teaching hall, where the Indian tricolor spread across almost an entire wall behind Khan saab, and the images of Saraswati, Durga, and Krishna—which he felt were “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “deeply resonant” in these times. What remained with him most was the tenderness of the legend: the maestro cooking chicken, then sitting down to play “Chandanandan.Rai, moved by the recital, told him he had revealed “truth in its entirety”.Rai’s portraits of anonymous faces were equally arresting. He turned his lens on Kolkata’s most fragile and enduring worlds: the homeless, the dying, the idol makers of Kumartuli, the pilgrims at Kalighat. At dawn on the banks of the Hooghly, he photographed wrestlers. He moved through the flower market at Mallick Ghat, the crowded gullies of Burrabazar, and the lanes of Boubazar, alive with businessmen, musicians, and jugglers. His lens also entered the fading rooms of impoverished zamindars, where broken chandeliers still hang in the boithakhana, remnants of a vanished world. In his photographs, even what was disappearing did not vanish unseen.
