The Chatterjee & Lal gallery in Mumbai is showing an exhibition by the Indian photojournalist Sunil Janah (1918-2012) entitled A Modern Vision. This excellent exhibition retraces through powerful black and white images, the years of modernisation of the country from 1940 to the 1960s.
Photographer and reporter for the Indian Communist Party’s newspaper People’s War that became People’s Age, Sunil Janah is Margaret Bourke-White’s guide across the entire country between 1945 and 1948 during the time , she worked for Life magazine. In 1948 he founds his studio in Kolkata. Distancing himself from the Communist Party, he nevertheless remains a committed photographer and continues to document the lives of the rural population and the poorest tribes, such as those of the Indian workers engaged in Nehru’s great leap forward. Witness to the birth of modern India, he is also the chronicler of the troubles that shook the country: the famines, like those in Bengal in 1943; the peasants’ riots or the political independence rallies. Photographer of modern India, he follows his heroes: Gandhi, Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, or Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the Indian nationalist leader, in their ascent to power.
The exhibition being shown by Chatterjee & Lal let us discover the period where a new generation of men led by Nehru, commit the country to the modern era. Industrial modernity, but also artistic with Le Corbusier’s projects in Chandigarh, or the blossoming of modern painting through the works of M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza or Krishen Khanna. Sunil Janah, like his architect and painter counterparts puts his talent at the service of his country as is shown in these vintage prints of the largest factories and industrial sites in the country.
A photography to the glory of modern India
Sunil Janah has us enter the coalmines of Bihar and Bengal, the steelworks of Bilhai in the centre of the country, the aluminium factories of Muri in the north-west of India.
His polished images, magnify the industrial beauty and the power which emanates from it. The workers in the Tata factory at Jamshedpur or those in the power station in the Damodar valley appear dwarfed by the gigantic size of the machines and the molten material. The factories running at full steam, wreathed in smoke, the workers busy on the production line of the Hindustan Automobile Factory, those in the Tata factories getting together to celebrate its golden jubilee: it is a whole country that is working on the construction of a new state. The rare portraits in the exhibition such as the miners of Ranigunj, show strong bodies with bulging muscles or, tools in hand, concentrated on their tasks.
Sunil Janah’s pictures leave us with a rare and precious testimony of the birth and blossoming of industrial India. A very beautiful exhibition that pays homage to one of India’s most important contemporary photographers.
EXHIBITION
Sunil Janah : A Modern Vision
Jusqu’au 28 novembre 2015
Chatterjee & Lal
01/18 Kamal Mansion Floor 1
Arthur Bunder Road Colaba
Mumbai 400 005
India
http://chatterjeeandlal.com
suniljanah.org
