Eight Magnum Photogs Show Us The India Of The Last 50 Years

Grain bags as bed, Calcutta, India, 1951 © Werner Bischof/ Magnum Photos.

In this group showing titled Magnum Ke Tasveer at ICIA, eight photographers from elite photo agency Magnum—Steve McCurry, Raghu Rai, Bruno Barbey, Marilyn Silverstone, Ferdinando Scianna, Olivia Arthur, Abbas and Werner Bischof—show us an India of instantly recognisable tropes, such as bare-chested sadhus, lunching ladies and marginalised communities, that despite their familiarity make for powerful images. The photographers are seasoned India hands for the most part, and they show us snippets of history from the last half-century, moments of uncommon stillness where external events of tragedy and strife are kept at bay, outside both the photographer’s frame and our context of reference. Even when we see moments of sheer terror—as with McCurry’s immaculately framed shot of a girl carried in the arms of a man as they wade through a flood in Porbandar—there is an unsettling beauty to the composition, of the arch of the girl’s neck and the red and green colours in her outfit so at odds with the muddy brown waters.

It’s a feeling that plays out in other photos too; Marilyn Silverstone’s black and white shot of a young Jackie Kennedy, her headscarf and dark glasses in place, in a boat in Udaipur with her sister and the maharani of Mewar, was taken just a year before her husband’s assassination. In Werner Bischof’s image of a man napping on sacks of grain sent by foreign countries, there is only the barest hint at the widespread famine crisis of 1951. There is a muted romance to these shots, one we typically associate with the India of old, and strikingly little sign of our impending economic and urban boom. Instead, you get the sense of a country still in the throes of finding its footing and stumbling as much as succeeding. Whether in Bruno Barbey’s titillating headless effigies on Chowpatty Beach, Silverstone’s Gayatri Devi dressed in finery, or Ferdinando Scianna’s pot-bellied man basking in the shade, there is finally a sense of India as it has always been, unchanging and varied all at once.

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