Raghu Rai's photographs of Bangladesh's liberation War are among the world’s best specimens of visual war coverage
In his seminal work, An Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm wrote, “Man is the only mammal who is a large-scale killer and a sadist.” Further, stating that “Malignant aggression” was a “characteristic only of man”, he added elsewhere in the book that its “main manifestations — killing and cruelty” — were, for humans, “pleasureful without needing any other purpose.” As I read it, some of the scenes I had witnessed in Bangladesh during the country's liberation War in 1971, flashed across my mind, leaving me, as always, shocked and numbed.
I had read of the holocaust and Hitler's concentration camps, of Stalin's purges and Gulag. These were, however, distant horrors which disturbed and angered, but ephemerally. Invariably, life's flow engulfed me again after a while and carried me forward. In Bangladesh, I was a direct witness, not of the deeds but their aftermath. Had I not seen what the Pakistani Army and its Bangladeshi collaborators from the ranks of the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, Razakars, Al Badr and Al Shams did, I could have never believed that humans could perpetrate such horrific acts.
I was in The Statesman then and based in Kolkata, where I was born. Raghu Rai was a colleague, whom I met several times as he transited through the city on his assignments to the Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) border and beyond. Every time I saw his efforts — as published photographs and as prints discarded — I felt something cold turn inside me.
Wars profoundly affect both victims and witnesses. The result can be great reportage — sometimes in the form of a book like John Hersey's Hiroshima, which, first published as a report in The New Yorker, chronicles the city's virtual obliteration by the atom bomb dropped on it on August 6, 1945. It can also be works of art and literature. Pablo Picasso's classic painting Guernica, named after a village in Spain mercilessly bombed in 1937 by General Franco's air force during the Spanish Civil War, remains a searing testimony to the horrors of war. Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front touchingly and graphically portrays the tragedy and slaughter of World War I.
Raghu Rai's collection of photographs, entitled, Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom, published recently by Niyogi Books, depicts the havoc wrought by Pakistani troops as they unleashed themselves, with a savagery rarely equalled in history, on Bangladesh's unarmed civilian population, the heroic resistance by the Mukti Bahini this triggered, and scenes from the conflict between India and Pakistan that constituted the culminating stage of the liberation War. Besides the final triumph of Indians and Bangladeshis and the humiliation of the surrendering Pakistanis, it portrays, with the rare sensitivity and photographic skill that one associates with Rai, the march of some of the 10 million people who fled Bangladesh to escape the mass rape and other atrocities that accompanied the genocide by Pakistani troops, the trauma writ large on their faces and the horrific living conditions and the exposure to the elements they had to endure as India struggled to cope with a rapidly swelling tide.
Photography of wars and their aftermaths is nothing new. John McCosh's work during the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-49) being among the earliest examples. Felice Beato's prints depicting scenes from the last stages of the great uprising of 1857-58, essentially reflected the imperialist point of view but were not without their historic significance. In the 20th Century, the Spanish Civil War produced a rich crop with Robert Capa's shot of a falling Republican soldier enjoying an iconic status. World War II and the Korean and Vietnamese wars saw photography emerge as an integral and indispensable part of war reportage, which also made it a rich raw material of history.
Raghu Rai's coverage of Bangladesh's liberation War ranks among the best examples of the genre, and the outstanding Bangladeshi photographer Shahidual Alam's introduction places it in its historical as well as contemporary contexts with deeply moving eloquence. And it is only apt that Niyogi Books' publication has come when Bangladesh's youth have risen en masse demanding condign punishment for their countrymen who had collaborated with the Pakistanis and participated in the genocide and rape.