India: A History in the Making

The role of the people behind the lens remains relatively obscure, in spite of their vital contribution towards anchoring and mapping out the trajectory of the Indian nation. Photography came to India soon after the discovery of the daguerreotype, and by the 1930s, a range of new cameras in the Indian market were popularizing photography for just about anyone. With the visual element being enhanced, a new relationship between the newspaper and its reader was forged.

Lalit, Udit and Raj Gopal, and their friend Kulwant Roy, were in many ways the pioneers of photojournalism in India, and produced a body of work deeply rooted in the country’s culture, politics and history.

The photographs were often a collaborative effort, created at a time when bylines and individual credits were not sought after and guarded the way they are today.

In the early days of his career Roy would travel with his friends and photograph events along with them.

Examining their work in retrospect, it is easy to overlook the fact that these photographers were self taught, and had over a period of time developed what could be called a photojournalistic style and an eye for this kind of documentation.

They recorded and captured the events preceding and following India’s independence, in the true spirit of the medium and never manipulated, reconstructed or ‘staged’ images, as many of their American contemporaries did while documenting the Great Depression and other milestones of the 1930s and 40s.

What is remarkable is that Roy tells the story his way and not as another person would have, and as many have told it.

Compare these photographs with some of the world-famous images of the middle of the twentieth century.

Those that depict the rubble of bombed European cities like Dresden, the horror of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, jubilant crowds welcoming Allied liberators in Paris, the red flag being raised by a precariously poised Russian soldier on the Reichstag in Berlin, and the atom bomb’s mushroom cloud on 6 August 1945, exhaled by the flattened city of Hiroshima.

For much of the world, the most memorable part of the middle of the twentieth century was spent in uniform, or at least coping with the actions of those who were. The photographs associated with the Second World War pull us into a narrative of colossal devastation, incredible evil, ecstatic relief, expensive victory and—with the mushroom cloud-into the contemplation of a nuclear catastrophe which has been dreaded ever since.

Such photographs are not just illustrations but declarations. The Second World War photographs often declare the vulnerability of civilization, that our planet could and did spin out of control, and that huge human costs were paid.

Kulwant Roy’s photographs never make us feel that history is headed in the wrong direction. On the contrary, they declare that the world was progressing.

In so doing, they embody the optimism of the first decades of independent India. Their assumptions are those of their times: that is what makes them so valuable.

Assumptions, like microscopes and telescopes, both enhance vision and constrict it. So, after we have enjoyed the photographs for the first time, let us pause, look at them afresh, and interrogate what they celebrate.

By contrast, the Indian narrative in this volume is relatively unworried. No terrifying weaponry, no wounded soldiers, no defeated leaders are on display. On the auspicious, pivotal day, 15 August 1947, there seem to have been no losers. At the end, everyone seems victorious: Mountbatten looks as happy as Nehru.

Kulwant Roy’s photographs declare that politicians in India — whether from the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, or the British government — were more or less in control of events. They did their work, negotiated, argued and eventually achieved satisfactory outcomes.

Gazing at each photograph for the second time, allow the imagination to wander, to muse on matters that lurk in the background, have been banished towards the edges, or even exiled beyond the frame. The suffering, for example.

In the Bengal Famine of 1943, between two and three million people perished; in the Partition riots of 1947, well over two hundred thousand people were slaughtered. Kulwant Roy was not in Bengal at the time of the famine, so that is inevitably omitted (this is one man’s archive, not a pictorial history of India).

Partition violence surfaces in his collection indirectly, through photographs of refugee rehabilitation. No accident perhaps, because partition fiction also tends to shun violence in favour of acts of solidarity and kindness.

More than redemptive intention is at play, however. Arguably, the Bengal Famine is rarely given its due emphasis in Indian history: should not an event in which three million people died be given much more space than Jallianwala Bagh—in which, according to one estimate, 379 died? If it is not, one reason may be that the Bengal Famine was not central to Indian nationalism. Another reason is that famine only affected the poor.

This suggests, incidentally, why contemporary European photographs show much suffering, while Indian photographs do not. European cities endured bombing in which rich people died too. European populations underwent conscription, as a result of which important families were harmed (the British foreign secretary and future prime minister, Anthony Eden, lost a son; Viceroy Lord Wavell’s son had his hand amputated due to injuries on the Burma front). When the high and mighty suffer, historians and photojournalists take note. In India the rich did not suffer and ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen.’

Indian elitism allowed national accounts of national history to exude a sunny official spirit because the poor were viewed from a great social distance. Or, they were viewed from a podium, as by the leaders who addressed them. Like most histories, photographs tended to focus on leaders rather than followers. Invert the priorities, and another set of questions arises.

At a second glance, every photograph which includes a crowd, raise, even if it cannot answer, the issue of popular aspirations. It is up to us, as in a school exercise, to fill in the blanks, or to imagine placards with lists of demands on them.

With the departure of British officials, the Indian members of the Indian Civil Service, the Indian police, the railways and other civilian services—as well as the Indian officers of the armed forces—did extremely well. Next to the Congress leaders, government officers were, ironically enough, the group for whom the benefits of independence were quickest to materialize. The majority of higher posts, hitherto occupied by Europeans, suddenly became vacant; so did the posts occupied by those Muslim officials who left for Pakistan. All over the country, Indian officials stepped into the shoes of their departing British seniors, and pronounced that their new boots were not too big, but fitted very well. It was a time of windfall promotions for them. The schoolboy dream of a double promotion, on which so many of these creatures of the competitive examination had been brought up, came true for them in adult life.

Looking away from these officials helps to convey the impression that in 1947 India made a completely fresh start. This fits nationalist versions of Indian history, in which 1947 marks a totally new beginning: an alien state became indigenous, as if in 1947 a magic wand had been vigorously waved.

In a sense, the national state was guilty of its colonial origins. The government of independent India tried to show that it was built on the wreckage of colonialism, rather than on the foundations provided by the colonial state. This entailed overlooking the obvious continuity in the personnel of the Indian state after independence.

Small wonder then, that textbooks did not carry prominent photographs of ICS officers like H.M. Patel (who joined the Indian Civil Service in 1924 and eventually became home minister of independent India) and Sir C.D. Deshmukh (who was knighted in 1944, and was India’s finance minister during 1950-56) or Chandulal Trivedi, Dharma Vira, B.K. Nehru, L.P. Singh, and the others who became governors of several important states. In retrospect, one of the most obvious (though unstated) projects of nationalism, and of the state, in independent India was the concealment of continuity. Such figures were embodiments of that continuity.

Photographers, like historians, work by selection. The collection of photographs in this volume cleanses Indian history of its unrelieved sufferings, unmet aspirations, and underplayed continuities. And the selection makes itself look like the only sensible, logical, natural one, perhaps the only one possible.

As time passes, the past looks ever more cut and dried. Regret cannot survive for more than a single generation. Later, it increasingly looks as if history could not have occurred in any other way.

Yet the map of the Indian subcontinent, as it appeared in 1950, would have surprised most observers in the mid-1940s. The post-war years were marked by their fluidity, revealed in the plethora of plans: the Cabinet Mission Plan, Wavell’s Breakdown Plan, Plan Balkan, the Mountbatten Plan. Even in the first few months of 1947, the future of India seemed undecided. Many different outcomes seemed possible.

With these images in mind, let us return to the volume at hand. Through Kulwant Roy’s vivid photographs, we do indeed see a fascinating history in the making. But if we are attentive, what we also see being made, equally fascinatingly, is a particular version of history.

Kulwant Roy was one contributor to a process of representation; other contributors included scores of journalists, creative writers, film-makers, and historians. In subject and tone, we have here the standard narrative of Indian nationalism, in which foresighted and farsighted leaders mobilized millions of people to achieve liberation from British rule, and guided their country wisely thereafter. This process of representation may not have been consciously worked out, but it is there nevertheless.

In essence, it represents history as being in the control of great and wise men.

In the late nineteenth century, the Congress party had been derided by a British viceroy as representing no more than 'a microscopic minority’.

Congressmen claimed, on the other hand, to be the authentic voice of the Indian people. By the time Kulwant Roy took his photographs, we can see ample evidence of their popularity.

India at this time contained about 400 million people, while British jails in the country could hold less than 150,000 inmates.

If even one in five hundred young men in India could be persuaded to go to jail, the administration would be overwhelmed. From the British point of view, this made negotiations with the Congress necessary.

Gandhi, Nehru and Patel were lawyers trained in London. The Congress leaders in these photographs are always in Indian dress. Do our photographs (and history writing) somehow suggest that dress is more important than education?

Maulana Azad sits regally in a rickshaw pulled by turbaned and barefoot men. Observe his body language.

Though Gandhi did not, many other Indian leaders exuded a patrician air. Nehru, Patel and others strode towards independence, talking unintimidated to British viceroys, Cabinet ministers and administrators.

These Indian leaders undoubtedly made great sacrifices. But between British and Indian political adversaries who sat at the same table, or between men who wore footwear and those who did not, which social distance was greater?

The imperial sunsets over Delhi’s Red Fort, and the Viceregal Palace on Raisina Hill, provide a remarkable contrast. The Mughals slowly lost their hold over their territories, and the British later established themselves by their victories over their various enemies, battle by battle, and region by region.

But when the British left, the entire territory and state apparatus was handed over at one stroke, in a single negotiated transaction, to the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League.

Having fought for freedom, the Congress leaders achieved power. Our images show that they were now listened to very attentively indeed.

Amongst the leaders, there was less hierarchy and more informality than would be the case in later Indian politics. Or so it seems when we see Nehru and Patel seated on a sofa, with G. B. Pant perched on one of its arms.

In elections in 1937, the Muslim League fared poorly; in elections in 1946, it swept to success, giving more credence (despite the limited franchise) to its claim to represent a majority of Muslims. The 1946 elections were fought by the League using the demand for Pakistan as its plank.

Nevertheless, Jinnah refrained from spelling out exactly what he meant by Pakistan. Such deliberate vagueness had large implications. It allowed the League to develop strongholds in areas like UP and Bihar, while Bengal and Punjab, where Pakistan was to be established, converted to the cause only later. Muslim League leaders like Liaqat Ali Khan, who was from UP, were thus uprooted, deracinated at the moment of their triumph.

The transfer of populations between India and Pakistan is now recognized as among the largest human movements in history. There is ample evidence to show that common people expected to continue to live where they did, even if regimes changed.

But the 1947 partition riots and migrations were not expected by any of the leaders either, whether they were British, Indian or Pakistani. Their miscalculations were gigantic.

If they had been aware of the human costs, would they have voted for partition anyway?

When the Japanese routed the Allies in the East in 1942, they captured 60,000 Indian soldiers. Twenty thousand agreed to go into battle against their former British masters, in the INA commanded by Subhas Bose. After Japan lost the war, the soldiers found themselves prisoners once again, this time in the hands of the Allies.

The British considered the members of INA to be traitors, who deserved severe punishment. Angry and self-righteous, the government resolved to court-martial the INA leaders not in some remote provincial barracks, but in the Red Fort in Delhi.

Quite mistakenly, the government expected the ordinary Indian soldier to rejoice. When the officials realized that the rest of the army was not unsympathetic to the INA, a government which had set its heart on making an example of the rebels, was forced to cut its losses and release them.

Congress leaders had taken up the cause of the INA’s defence, and toured the country, mobilizing support for the men facing trial.

Among the INA defence lawyers were Asaf Ali, Bhulabhai Desai, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kailash Nath Katju, and Tej Bahadur Sapru.

However, after independence, the INA men were not even reinstated in their old jobs: most of them gained a few moments of glory, and lost their livelihood. And it was not the Indian National Army, but the British Indian Army, that provided the armed forces of independent India.

Mahatma Gandhi visited the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in the first week of May 1938 and then again in October of the same year, as the guest of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

The NWFP contained perhaps the most well-organized and disciplined wing of the freedom movement. The Khudai Khidmatgars, a corps of dedicated workers founded by Ghaffar Khan in September 1929, were committed to non-violence.

In a region notorious for violence and vendetta, this seemed miraculous. Ghaffar Khan also seemed to make it clear that non-violence was not a Hindu idea, but could be effectively couched in an Islamic idiom.

The NWFP became, in the course of time, a part of Pakistan. Ghaffar Khan became critical of the Congress. He said that he and his followers were thrown to the wolves in 1947. As far as he was concerned, things went wrong.

Could we speculate how, if given the wisdom of hindsight, he might have conducted his politics?

The 1947 partition, with millions of people uprooted, and lakhs killed in communal riots, gives the impression of a terrible mess: the integration of the princely states can be claimed, on the other hand, to be a political success.

Rulers were cajoled and coerced by Sardar Patel and his right hand-man, V.P. Menon. As a result, over five hundred and fifty princely states ceased to exist and were rapidly absorbed, without indigestion, into independent India and Pakistan.

G.D. Birla remarked: ‘Sardar Patel gave a party to the princes and I found that they were as docile and submissive to the new rulers as they have been to the old.’

There was indeed an argument that, with the end of British rule, the princes, who had treaty relations with the Crown, could claim to be the rulers of free countries.

Some among the princes did entertain the idea of declaring their independence. Others saw themselves forming a ‘Rajastan’, a union of princes constituting a third country which could coexist with Pakistan and Hindustan.

If the princely states had been able to put up a more united front, what might the map of India have looked like?

The 1950s were years of optimism. India was free so its leaders and people ought to be able, it seemed, to make rapid progress, which colonial rule had denied them.

In this context, the Bhakra Dam on the river Sutlej, completed in 1963, became a symbol of progress. Here nature was being harnessed to provide irrigation, hydroelectric power, and happiness. It was an exuberantly confident enterprise with a heroic quality.

But we now know that, after independence, India progressed much more slowly than expected. Heroic images obscure stubborn statistics of continuing poverty.

Moreover, big dams are now associated with displaced people. We are now more likely to look, not just at the large machines and structures, but at the human beings they often overshadow.

We are more likely to ask: What happened to these people? What, in modern India, were their destinations, and those of their children?

The events of 1947 airlifted Indian leaders, most notably Nehru, into more prominent roles on an international stage. Arrivals and departures would henceforth more commonly be associated with airports and aeroplanes, rather than with the railway carriages which had couriered the Indian national movement. Rulers belong to an international club, the rules of which do not permit train travel, especially by second or third class.

Here, Nehru addresses a gathering right at the airport.

Carefully choreographed state rituals replaced crowded and often unruly public meetings. On state visits to India, dignified dignitaries posed for photographs.

There was no need to keep the public at bay: Indian prime ministers and presidents could still travel with their guests in open-top cars, not bulletproof ones. Compared to the world as we know it, air travel was more dangerous, but politics was safer.

Photographs of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi remind us how totally times changed. Bhutto was hanged in 1979; Indira Gandhi was assassinated fifteen years later.

Or look at Nehru smiling next to Chou En-lai, quite unaware of India’s forthcoming disastrous war with China.

Look again at Nehru, who died gently compared to Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and would have been disturbed to know how violent their departures would be.

Or look at the epitome of contemporary glamour, Jackie Kennedy, laughing delightedly, quite unaware that in the very next year, on 22 November 1963, her husband John F. Kennedy would be shot in the head, and she would be splattered with his blood.

Even Gandhi was eventually assassinated in 1948.

Quite obviously, we are aware of a future of which Kulwant Roy's subjects had no clue. Are their smiles enabled by innocence, because they lack our knowledge?