Raghu Rai, who will be part of a documentary to air on HISTORY TV18 on Independence Day, shared his memories from the past with I Kaur
It is for the people who didn’t witness the struggle that made India what it is today. To celebrate the 66th year of independent India, HISTORY TV18 will air a 1987 film Tamas on August 15 along with a documentary Rewind 1947. It has interviews of few survivors of the Partition who moved to India. One of them is photographer, Raghu Rai.
The lensman feels that showing a film like Tamas is a great initiative to educate the youth. Raghu reminisced that as a child witnessing Partition, he was made to leave home and move into an unexplored territory. He lived in camps for days, travelled on foot and even broke into houses. The feeling remains with him till today. He shared, “When old friends who have always been with each other depart, you feel pain and that a part of you is lost. That is how it was with India and Pakistan. We were one country and on the basis of religion and politics and some inflated egos, we were divided. See the price both the nations are paying today for it. But when an Indian visits Pakistan or vice-verse, one is treated with love and affection.”
He added, “The Partition was unnatural for me. When we shifted from Pakistan to India after staying in camps for two days, we came to Jalandhar and some of us came to very rich localities. We got one house which was a Muslim house and we had to break open the locks. We stayed there for several days and eventually my father got stationed at New Delhi. While we were leaving, he strictly told me not to take away anything from the house and I asked whyIJ He said, ‘Maybe someday when things get better the people who owned this house will come back.’ But they never did.”
The Bangladesh War in 1971 was the time when Raghu revisited some old places. He captured pain and suffering which was not different from what he had gone through. “When the Bangladesh refugees started coming to India, I was a photojournalist with The Statesman and every month I would see people crossing the India-Bangladesh border on foot. I captured the suffering and emotions of the people who were coming to India and living in shelters that were provided to them. There were two important pictures that I captured — one of a child with deep set eyes. He was crying with his eyes open, but because he had deep set eyes the tears are not flowing. The other one was of an old woman on whose cheeks two drops of tears remained. She was in utter pain.”
These pictures that Raghu clicked have impacted his life deeply. “When I printed these pictures and was looking at it, my three-year old-son walked in and glanced at them. I suddenly saw a lot of anguish and sadness on his face and he turned to me and said, ‘Why is he cryingIJ’ So, the question is actually whyIJ Even this three-year-old child is questioning me. looking at him at that point was more painful than the pain I had experienced as a child.”
Raghu feels that things in the country have become far worse than what they were. “We haven’t learnt and never will — history repeats itself,” he concluded.