How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition

That picture, “Burial of an Unknown Child,” became the defining image of the disaster, a depiction of tragedy so viscerally infused with loss that, even today, it appears on banners protesting the chemical company responsible, which has yet to make full amends for the incident. “Burial” is one of dozens of photos that Rai, who passed away last month, at the age of eighty-three, selected for his 2015 book “Picturing Time,” a kaleidoscopic compendium of work that spans fifty years and chronicles modern India through its formative decades, as it grappled with newfound statehood and the volatile forces of breakneck modernization.

Rai was born in 1942, and began his career as a photojournalist in his twenties, at the Hindustan Times, an English-language broadsheet. He then bounced around other publications before becoming, in the early eighties, a photo editor at India Today, the most widely circulated magazine in the country. By then, he’d already joined Magnum, the prestigious international photography coöperative, at the invitation of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern street photography, who had come across Rai’s work in Paris’s Gallery Delpire. Rai worked at India Today for about ten years, shooting luminaries such as Mother Teresa, the director Satyajit Ray, and the Dalai Lama, who remained a friend for decades. Eventually, he set out as a freelancer, embarking on trips from the snowy Himalayan territory of Ladakh, on India’s northern border, to Kanyakumari, the coastal town at the southern tip of the subcontinent. As India took its place on the world stage, developing nuclear capabilities and harnessing its exploding population, as it lost one Prime Minister to a heart attack and the next to assassination, as it suffered bout after bout of sectarian violence, Rai was there. His was the lens through which so much of the world—and so many Indians themselves—came to view and understand the nation.