This book is a photographic history of modern India-political, social and cultural. Equally, it is about timeless India. Had this to be done in words, it would have been an impossible enterprise. Photographs tell a story more eloquently and effectively than learned articles, books on contemporary history or novels. But putting together such a collection could not have been easy. Selecting the images that add up to a visual history of modern India is in itself a difficult task. The greater problem, however, is choosing a starting point, always a tricky business when dealing with a civilization and society as complex as ours. This book contains the work of all these different kinds of lensmen. There are the pioneering portraits of nineteenth-century royality by Raja Lala Deen Dayal, photographs of epic quality by the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, romantic and moving images by Raghubir Singh and Raghu Rai, and classics of photojournalism by Homai Vyarawalla and Kishor Parekh. Often the subject makes the photographs timeless: Mother Teresa at prayer; Gandhi’s funeral; Nehru making his ‘Tryst with destiny’ speech at the stroke of the midnight hour on 14/15 August; Nargis and Raj Kapoor singing in the rain in the film Shri 420; India’s obsession with cricket portrayed through a picture of Sachin Tendulkar aged five wielding a cricket hat; the tragedy of the Bhopal gas leak conveyed through the sightless eyes of a half-buried child and India’s exploding population through a solid mass of humanity crowding Churchgate station in Bombay. Each image is worth more than a book because it will stay in your mind for years to come. Together they bring you modern India through its lived moments.
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