India the Definitive Images: 1858 to the Present

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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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Khushwant Singh

Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. After university education in Lahore and London, he practiced at the Lahore High court before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with all India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojana, editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and the Hindustan Times and chief editor of New Delhi. Today he is India’s best known columnist. Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. His published works include the classic two-volume A History of the Sikhs, the novels Train to Pakistan, Delhi and The Company of Women, his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature, Sikh history and religion, and current affairs. Khushwant Singh was Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).

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Bibliographic information

Title
India the Definitive Images: 1858 to the Present
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
0670049654
Length
166p., Plates; 22cm.
Subjects