Ram Dhamija’s exhibition of photographs brings alive forgotten images of India and the people who shaped her destiny

It was a time when the emerging rich in India consumed tea and scones and Nehru’s speeches. It was a time when all a lonely soldier had for company on the Indo-China boarder was his submachine gun. It was a time when Ram Dhamija, journalist, writer and later director of the Press Information Bureau, travelled with his camera, capturing for posterity the iconic images of the passing era. An ongoing exhibition of his photographs called Preoccupations at the India International Centre shows a country in transition.

“From the 1940s to the 1960s, the newly independent India was shaping her destiny, a process which my father, Ram, witnessed closely. In the late 1980s, he put down his camera because he felt that India had lost sight of the dream it had when we won independence,” says

Himman Dhamija, who curated this show with Safina Uberoi. Himman, a cinematographer for films like Little Zizou, Mangal Pandey and Chandni Chowk to China , adds that the exhibition was put together from forgotten negatives of his father’s vast stock.

“I believe that one should shoot like French legend Henry Cartier Bresson where one captures, in a fraction of a second, a significant moment in time,” says Ram, 84, who follows a purist classical style.

The exhibition is a window to our past — when British gentlemen turned their attention to engineering, and inspecting Indian canals was a job for the suit-wearing sahib, while large parts of rural India fought draught and starvation. There are images of a younger fashionable Indira Gandhi, of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier working on his plans for Chandigarh and of artist M F Husain painting on the terrace of Café Naz facing Jama Masjid. There are telling portraits of dancer Balasaraswati.

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