86 THE CARAVAN
out of focus · books
of India: an environment in which
people, animals, religion, tradition,
myth, manners, history and climate
are inseparable from one another and
from the vast land of rivers, mountains,
plains and plateaus.”
The governing logic of his oeuvre
should be understood in this context.
Singh charted India region by region.
His champions argue that he created a
“personal” vision of his country. But the
diorama-like titles—Kashmir: Garden of
the Himalayas, Kerala: The Spice Coast
of India—are the surest giveaway.
If he were simply an orientalist,
Singh would be of little interest. The
thing is that he was, or at any rate
became, an artist of remarkable skill.
There are countless images that you
can commend for the manipulation of
perspective, latitudinal tension, gestur-
al choreography or melodies of colour.
But Singh’s overall vision remained
retrograde. He continued to shoot of-
fensive portraits and postcard tableaus
and play silly games with colour, even
as his technical abilities improved.
That lopsided development is finally
damning.
raghubir singh was born in 1942 into
a semi-aristocratic family in Jaipur. His
father, a Thakur, inherited land around
the city; his mother was a devout Hindu
housewife. They lived in a large haveli,
poring over their ancestry, enjoying
feasts and festivals. It was a cloistered
childhood, to say the least. “We began
cycling to school when I was in my ear-
ly teens,” Singh wrote, “There, for the
first time, I came into contact with the
outside worlds, and made friends with
schoolmates of other communities.”
The family kept alive a rich sense of
the past. Singh’s father, for example,
claimed to own a knife that once be-
longed to Akbar. His mother, more
ludicrously, traced their ancestors back
to Rama. “The martial trappings,” he
wrote, “the ceremonies, and the stories
my father and mother told me provided
us with a treasure around which we
built our childhood games. In our fan-
tasies we believed ourselves to be part
of a fairy-tale world of fearless war-
riors on galloping horses and battling
elephants.”
Agrarian land reform brought an end
to their lavish lifestyle. Singh’s joint
family broke up, lost much of its wealth,
and he followed his brother to work as a
tea-plantation manager in West Bengal.
When his job applications were reject-
ed, he switched to photography. Shoot-
ing in Calcutta, he immersed himself
in the city’s bhadralok intellectual life.
Satyajit Ray, who wrote the introduc-
tion to Rajasthan, and designed his
early book covers, would be a lifelong
friend.
Returning to Jaipur, Singh hustled
as a freelancer. By the late 1960s, he
had regular commissions from Life,
The New York Times Magazine, and
National Geographic (the last, his friend
Ram Rahman has said, gave him an
unlimited supply of Kodachrome slide
film, then unavailable in India). These
assignments—neatly framed shots of
festivals, “tribals,” political rallies, and
so forth—were simple enough. In his
own work, he faced the harder chal-
lenge of finding a personal voice.
Initially, like most postcolonial art-
ists, Singh worked after Western mod-
els, such as Cartier-Bresson (whom he
met in Jaipur) and Eugene Atget. That
said, the influence of National Geo-
g raphic remained overriding. Singh’s
early books on Calcutta (1974), the
Ganga (1975), the Kumbh Mela (1980)
and, one could argue, Rajasthan (1981),
are largely filled with expository shots
on familiar themes: decaying mansions
in Calcutta, the Indian peasantry, reli-
gious processions, and political rallies.
His sense of visual harmony, and talent
for making unlikely contrasts work, are
evident in some of the images, such as
A Marwari Wedding Reception in South
Calcutta’s Singhi Park (ca. 1972), with
its screaming pink sofas that nicely sit
against a green lawn (there is a rare
touch of satire here too). But by and
large, the work is unremarkable.
Two important things occurred dur-
ing this period, or rather, two events
were set in motion, though it took a
while for their effects to be felt. First,
Singh was commissioned by the great
American art historian Stuart Carey
Welch to shoot images of paintings in
Jaipur’s royal archives. This was a pro-
found experience, unsurprisingly, foropposite page: Morning on
Panchganga Ghat, Benares,
Uttar Pradesh, 1985below: A Marwari Wedding
Reception in South Calcutta’s
Singhi Park, Calcutta,
West Bengal, ca.1972succession raghubir singh