Kolkata is the muse as well as the host for a variety of photographs captured by Raghu Rai, which will be displayed at an international photo festival in the city. By Uma Nair

Photography for me is about darshan. In photography today, I see the art of tomorrow. It is something very unique for us,” ace lensman Raghu Rai had said when I met him in 1990. Over 38 years, the colossus of Indian photography still speaks the same language. He is on a whirlwind trip to the City of Joy to get ready for the Kolkata Photo Festival where he will unveil at least 60 photographs at the ICCR Gallery.

India is horizontal

Raghu has always been a critic of his own work and his reflections become vital to understand his corollary as well as his journey of more than 40 years of photographic Kolkata. “The time we live in is not just  complex, it is also  multi-layered. I have always said the experience of India is horizontal, it does not begin from anywhere, nor does it end anywhere. There comes a saturation point in any art form. A moment in space is just not enough and a panoramic experience creates the possibility of capturing simultaneity of moments happening in any given situation. And it opens up a much larger canvas to deal with. Kolkata for me is so many planes.”

More than the goddess

“Kolkata is more than just the goddess and the clamour and the chaos,” adds Raghu, “The city is about the pulse, it is about the heartbeat. The poets, the playwrights, the musicians — Kolkata awakens in us a world we cannot ignore. Only those maestros like Satyajit Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Samar Sen and Premendra Mitra could  have evoked such stirrings . Kolkata for me is a  passionate chronicle of a city and our times.”

Raghu’s images will swim and float and draw us into their maw. Elements and details go beyond the purely pictorial. But it is the quintessential 1987 photograph of a Woman and Kali along the Ganga River that is perhaps the most evocative. The goddess, the cow and the woman under the peepul tree offer a combination of mythical perspectives and proportions silhouetted by a quiet river and an industrial skyline in the distance an impressionist insignia. Raghu has always revelled in the art of  subtle allegory; he exalts the lexicon of the haiku; captures limited syllables, hunts structured lines to balance a number of varied elements floating into the frame. When you see the image you are enveloped in the  silence that descends as you savour an effortlessly articulated moment that is quintessentially Raghu.

The goddess and her  primordial energy is one that stirs myriad myths. Raghu stirs the crumbles of creation as there are worshippers, both individual and collective in Kolkata’s many neighbourhood pujas and the Bengali psyche. Raghu captures the release and frenzy during the immersion.

The common man

Raghu is an artist whose eyes scan the streets of Kolkata as well as the Hooghly and its banks. Shifting Sand Hooghly 1990 is yet another masterpiece which was a cover for his Calcutta book with a foreword written by Dominique Lapierre. Sinewed muscles and the boat become the vehicle of thoughts and expression. The agility and the grace of the common man often becomes the leitmotif of his lingua franca. Raghu loves talking about  dulcet waters, rough streets, crowded queues and indifferent merchants.

At another point you can hear the confounded machine groaning, shaking the foundation of a neogothic mould while a building rises out into a silhouette and looms over the top frame like a grand presiding deity. Architecture  etches itself out superbly when Raghu captures life in Kolkata  in minute details. His book will be full of  uncompromising contrasts offered by uncanny statements of a city, that defines as well as dispels its paradoxes as soon as they are born.

Artist’s studio 2004 Kolkata, Wrestlers under Howrah Bridge  2004: These are inspired vignettes and votives — auratic and allegorical, profound and profane, poetic and poignant. There is a measure of Raghu’s sentiments, as his photographs unpack what might be called the “symbolic aura” surrounding subject matter that traverses Calcutta to Kolkata. Raghu then captures Kolkata in its mysterious fullness of reality. His Kolkata will offer us insight into the collective consciousness of an India, which has insight and intuition.

India’s mapping

Again and again Raghu celebrates the power and pathos of contradiction, suggesting India’s mapping. The strong shadows in the lower space of Directing Traffic in Central Avenue, Kolkata(1990) contrasts with the luminous, if grayish, buildings in the upper space. The difference is heightened by the contrast between the isolated policeman — wearing a black shirt and white pants, thus epitomising the visual tension of the scene — and the traffic. At the Kolkata International Photo Festival Kolkata will be Raghu Rai’s magnum opus and the crowds will gather and regurgitate the sights and scenes of the yesteryear once more. And as the great T S Eliot wrote: “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past/ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.”