Singh found no contradiction between the sad-
ness and poverty he felt characterized everyday life
for many Indians, and the often joyous and sensu-
ous colors that naturally pervaded Indian life.
Singh’s color photographs produced from 35-mm
Kodachrome slide films set him apart from his
contemporaries, and, along with a few others,
notably Eliot Porter or Ernst Haas, he marked
the beginning of an new era for color photography.
Singh’s photographic works have been published
in more than a dozen books and organized geo-
graphically (by city, state, and river), thematically
(festivals such as Kumbh Mela), and experientially
(on the Grand Trunk Road and in the quintessen-
tial Indian car, the Ambassador)—each with an
informative introductory text written by him.
Always in pursuit of the right moment to take his
photograph, Singh’s relentlessly and instinctively
animated snapshots encapsulate the historic, the
natural, and the everyday images of India.
In 1968, Raghubir Singh visited Jaisalmer to
watch the noted filmmaker Satyajit Ray film a musi-
cal titledGoopy Gayen Bagha Bayen(The Adven-
tures of Goopy and Bagha). Like Ray, Singh
appreciated the ways in which a new Western med-
ium could be manipulated to capture vibrant images
of ordinary Indian subjects. Singh’s photographs of
Rajasthan, published in the book titledRajasthan:
India’s Enchanted Land(1980), are nostalgic photo-
graphic memoirs of his own life as he grew up there
as a child, and as an adult when he revisited
Rajasthan after moving to Paris. In an introspective
introduction to the book, Singh reminisces about his
family, his experiences, and the richness of his cul-
tural legacy that was entrenched in the sights and
sounds of Rajasthan, his native land. Through his
lens, he captured both its everyday and spectacular.
Singh’s photographic subjects ranged from the
simple village path and the village well, ordinary
villagers on streets, farmers, performers, camels,
schoolchildren, and bullocks; to images of the
Pushkar Fair, celebration of Holi, Rajasthani wed-
ding scenes, folk performances, and tribal dance-
dramas, to images of ramparts and battlements of
Rajasthan’s historic landscape.
Of the varied experiential images on India that
Raghubir Singh shot with his camera, those of the
Grand Trunk Road are noteworthy. Singh first heard
of the Grand Trunk Road, popularly known as the
G.T. Road, as a high school student in 1961. In 1988,
he drove the entire 1200-mile length of the G.T.
Road. He traveled a second time on this road in
- Driving 60–80 miles a day, he traveled from
Delhi to Amritsar and the nearby Pakistan border at
Atari. After returning to Delhi via the same route,
Singh flew to Calcutta. Thereafter, he started his
journey once again on the G.T. Road from near the
Botanical Gardens, Howrah, across the Hooghly
River from Calcutta and then headed north.
Along the long journey on the G.T. Road, Singh
captured images of both the humble and the monu-
mental: people, vehicles, monuments, shrines, pil-
grimage sites, statues, and life in general. For him,
the G.T. Road was a panorama of India, juxtapos-
ing the religious with the mundane, the poor with
the prosperous that defined Indian life. Thus,
along the road, Singh captured images of passen-
gers, pilgrims, tourists, water pipe repairmen,
workers in pavement dwellings, street performers,
and village fairs. Alongside holy sites of the Bud-
dhists and Jains as well as Mughal monuments,
Singh photographed bus stops, motels, floods,
road accidents, political meetings, and processions,
all representing the real images of a bustling but
organic Indian life.
For over thirty years in India, Singh made most of
his travels on the road in the quintessentially Indian
car, the Ambassador, manufactured by Hindustan
Motors since 1957. To him, like most Indians, this
automobile was India’s very own, a metaphor for
Independent India. This ubiquitous people’s car
also served as the official vehicle of the Indian
bureaucracy. ‘‘It is the People’s Car, the Politician’s
Car, India’s Rolls-Royce and stretch limousine all
rolled into one solid, yet shaky, entity,’’ observed
Singh in his introduction to his collection of street
photographs as he traveled far and wide in the
Ambassador. He photographed people, animals, per-
formers, landscapes, architecture, and even dirt dur-
ing his rides. Singh utilized the various shapes and
features of the automobile to frame his photographs.
His compositions are thus both spontaneous and
organic, and often deliberate.
A classic automobile, the Ambassador repre-
sented a cosmopolitan India, until the 1990s, when
economic liberalization allowed in other automo-
bile models and dwindled its popularity. Singh can-
didly describes it thus:
organic part of bird shit- and cow dung-coated India; it is
the good and bad of India; it is a solid part of that India
that moves on, even as it falls apart, or lags behind. In its
imperfection, it is truly and Indian automobile.
Singh further notes that as the Ambassador slowly
recedes into history, it is the symbolic watershed
between the old and the new. Singh’s last series of
photographs before his death in 1999,Auto-focus,
also associated with the Ambassador car, was exhib-
ited in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington,
D.C., in 2003.SINGH, RAGHUBIR