Time Frame

Way back in the 1930s and ’40s,when Kulwant Roy worked as a photojournalist,the day’s work hardly ever ended with the routine photo shoot. “Once the press photographers were done shooting pictures of Mahatma Gandhi,the latter would ask them to contribute to the Harijan Fund,one or even half an anna,” says Aditya Arya,acquaintance and inheritor of Roy’s formidable body of extant prints. These prints and several previously unpublished negatives,which lay forgotten in boxes in Arya’s studio,document the momentous decades before and after India’s independence,and constitute the building blocks of History in the Making: The Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy (HarperCollins India,Rs 4,999) that was launched in New Delhi by former West Bengal governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi on April 24.

Roy was a regular visitor to Arya’s house in Lahore in the 1930s. He was an inquisitive bachelor without any material possessions,driven by wanderlust,who learnt the craft of photojournalism from Arya’s three granduncles,and regaled the family with anecdotes like the one cited above. Arya delved into the contents of the box — after much prodding from his mother— 25 years after Roy’s death,only to discover stunning visuals of iconic events and individuals,at a time when photography was an expensive and difficult profession to pursue. Unfortunately,several boxes of prints,mainly containing photographs taken during Roy’s international travels from 1958 to 1962 had already been lost in shipment. Roy never recovered from this loss,and till his very last days,he would keep visiting city dumps on his scooter,hoping to find them.

Arya,who has worked as a photographer in the advertising industry,has not exhausted all the material in his possession. “I am gradually uncovering the layers,and there is an excellent documentation of the closed-door meetings of the Muslim League,to which Roy would be invited,that are yet to be digitised,” he says. Arya’s selection has been governed by other considerations as well. “There are several pictures of a Japanese lady he fell in love with,but we realised that she did not want to be disturbed when we tried to locate her,” he says. In the process of researching,Arya also managed to connect long-lost strands of the family,as distant relations started surfacing with letters and postcards they had received from Roy while he travelled in Paris,Bogota or Panama City .

Roy shows strong and wise leaders steering the nation,but Partition is missing. “Much of the documentation of Partition was done by foreign photographers. Nobody in India has a Partition album,and people like Roy were probably way too involved and affected by that tragedy to chronicle it,” says Arya.