King, Commoner, Citizen
Prashant Panjiar
indiapicture, Price not stated

Far and forgot to me are near,/ Shadow and sunlight are the same,/ The vanished gods to me appear,/ And one to me are fame and shame.” Prashant Panjiar’s book of 59 photographs reminds me of those lines from Emerson’s Brahma. He has titled them King, Commoner, Citizen for want, I suppose, of a title and theme, juxtaposing portraits of erstwhile royalty with bleak snapshots of this subcontinent’s most prostituted cliche: the Common Man.

Yet the slim, almost austere, brown-paper-covered volume creates boundaries where there are none. In essence, Panjiar’s is a cosmic canvas, where degradation and dignity, despair and hope, pain and joy are so intimately fused that it becomes impossible to see them in shades of contrast — proof, if it is needed, that under the packaging, we are all depressingly standardised, mass produced by an impersonal Creator.

Turn to a portrait of the reclusive Maharaja Narendra Singh Rathore who spent his entire life entombed in a red chamber, estranged from his wife and children. Rich, yet unaccountably poor. On the opposite page is farmer Sesdev Saraf, tenderly nursing his ailing wife Pushpanjali through the ravages of Orissa’s worst drought. Poor, yet unaccountably rich.

Then there is Fatheyab Ali Meerza, the dispossessed nawab of Bengal, forced to end his days in a decrepit one-room tenement. His unlikely partner is Kartik Chandra Das, a forgotten fixture in the Home For Freedom Fighters, Garia. Feudal and democrat, exiled by kingdom and country, to face the ignominy of an inglorious end.

... contd.