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The Rediff Special/ Arthur J Pais

A Master, through the eyes of friends

A week before his sudden death, photographer Raghubir Singh was excitedly talking about a number of life-changing events. For one, his friends such as Thomas Roma and Somi Roy had succeeded in persuading him to settle down in New York -- and he was getting ready for that. Singh had lived in India, France and England for the most part of his life.

Secondly, he wanted to get married to Gwen Darien, an editor, who has been his companion for the last few months. Singh, divorced from his Paris-based wife, has a 16-year-old daughter.

And then there were two projects that have been nearly completed: a book with dozens of pictures about the Ambassador car, and scores of self-portraits, made with the help of a camera held at a distance. He was also going to teach a multicultural course at Columbia University.

"He was most suited to teach the course," said his friend Roma, a professor and director of photography at the university.

"With Raghubir there was never such a thing as the past or the present," adds Roma. "He had a number of projects going in his head all the time."

Roma said the self-portrait project was something Singh had never done. "There are just a few pictures of him -- in India and a few other countries. But this time he was serious about the project, and he was getting the pictures taken in America. Perhaps it was a way of saying he was ready to settle down here."

Roma, Roy and many of Singh's friends talked eloquently how he had refused to compromise his vision, and how he had brought India to the attention of the world.

Many of his admirers used to tell him he should not confine himself to India. But now, two decades later, they realise they were wrong, says Roy, a New York-based film curator.

Singh was not just a wonderful photographer, the text accompanying his pictures were written with insight and grace and made marvellous reading, Roy adds. India was always a metaphor for Singh, Roy continues; it was a country of tradition, also a country that produced a great amount of computer technology -- and he sought to present the metaphor through his photographs.

He was a man of great perception, Roma says, recalling an incident a few months ago on the New York subway when a young man asked Roma for directions. Roma spent more than 10 minutes with the man.

"You have a great ease in speaking with strangers," Singh had told him then, "You should get that into your work more."

"I have been trying to do that since then," Roma said.

A retrospective exhibition of his photographs taken over three decades -- River of Color: The India of Raghubir Singh -- is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. Phaidon Press recently published a book with the same title.

Novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who got a thank-you note from Singh for her review of River of Color in The Los Angeles Times said he was looking forward to the exhibition of his work in Houston.

"It was going to be a very special event. For here was a man who had made the world understand India better just the way Satyajit Ray did through his films. We were planning a very good reception for him," Divakaruni, who teaches in the Texan city, said.

"Here was a person who was full of life -- and who was looking forward to doing much more. And suddenly it is all over," said photo editor Carole Kismaric, who knew Singh for over five years.

Kismaric, who was planning to go to India for her first visit, said Singh's photographs -- like Ray's films -- presented India's humanity to the world.

"I think the pictures he made of India could have been made only by an Indian," she said. "And yet they connected the East and the West in a peculiar but spontaneous way."

"What he translated for us was not a romantic or exotic or strange India," she continued. "Looking at his pictures you could recognise your own humanity. The people and sights we saw in his photographs united everyone."

Besides the River of Color, also available in America is Singh's The Grand Trunk Road: A Passage Through India from which the accompanying photographs in this tribute are reproduced.

Reviewing River of Color, Andy Grundberg wrote in The New York Times:

'At their best his pictures are filled with narrative incident and visual surprise, in a manner that is based in the decisive-moment approach of Henri Cartier-Bresson but that also is indebted to the more radical framing of Garry Winogrand. Of all of Singh's books to date, this is the most essential and stirring.'

A funeral service for Singh was held on Thursday. A memorial service and prayers by a Hindu priest at the Crestwood Memorial Chapel, 33 Spring, between Mulberry and Mott Street in Manhattan, New York, began on Thursday noon.

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