It is the sort of picture you could skip in a wedding album — a clumsy photo of the newlyweds, with the bride’s face turned away from the camera. But flip back to the page, and you might notice the anguish in that half-averted face. It’s the anguish of every girl leaving the familiar for the unknown — alone. Yet no one else in the photograph seems to share the young woman’s sorrow. Her mother is looking away, distracted by a guest, the groom is marching manfully on, heedless of this new companion clutching timidly at his shawl, and the thronging relatives are all wrapped up in their private worlds.

If a good picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, then each of Raghu Rai’s photographs is a novella that is at once timeless and contemporary, personal and impersonal, as raw as meat in a butcher shop, and as subtle as haiku poetry.

Maybe that's why Rai’s challenge has always been India, a country that simply defies description. A country so wide-angled and so overwhelmingly visual that extracting its essence is like distilling a tonne of gently rotting roses into a teaspoon. This time, he has done it with characteristic uniqueness — black-and-white images of our Technicolor nation, in a lavish tome called Raghu Rai’s India.

And if the title sounds vaguely conceited or proprietary, I think, they are liberties he has earned. One of the world’s most talented photographers according to none other than Henri Cartier-Bresson, this man nevertheless believes the photographer’s job is purely functional: “To cut out a frame-sized slice from the world around him, so faithfully and honestly, that were he to put it back, life and the world would begin to move again without a stumble.”

... contd.