To try to interview S. Paul in the early 80s was to face a reluctant conversationalist who presented an odd contradiction. As chief photographer of The Indian Express, he was used to the hurry-burry and crush of news photography. Yet, when he finally granted an interview, it was in the distant reaches of the Delhi zoo.
Every Sunday, Paul famously abandoned the world of news to follow his vision of a city from the edges, as it slowly cannibalised the fields and forests at its borders. This was then followed by solitary drives across the border into Haryana, then dotted with villages, migratory birds and vast planted acreage.
Our conversation that day gave me the first hint of a man committed to the periphery of engagement,
viewing life through a lens, distantly. As much as Paul’s work threw him into the embrace of action, even disaster, his own inclination was to retire into a fragile and retreating world. Paul spoke briefly about his early beginnings in Haryana and his fascination with cinema, buying his first camera, and then inducting younger brother Raghu Rai into photography.
Of a generation of news photographers who documented the cataclysmic changes in a new India, he was closer in spirit perhaps to T.S. Nagarajan, with their shared view of the photograph as a memoir of the delicacy and fragility of a rapidly changing India. With pride, he spoke of the number of cameras and awards he had won and the enormous coverage he had received worldwide.
The first edit
Between 1997 and 2004, when I curated two photography exhibitions in succession, my visits to the Paul household increased. Paul sahib’s wife was an unobtrusive presence, the household geared to his work, as he would bring out his contact sheets. What I realised over several visits was that he was sharing the core of the photographic process, the split-second shift of frames that determined the final print, offering a young curator an invaluable lesson in the photographer’s first edit.
Paul’s works were delicate, inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’, and two pictures titled ‘Jain Nuns’ were selected for the exhibition ‘Woman/ Goddess’. Three nuns are descending from a spiral staircase, unsure of where to go next. The rhythmic movement of the turning nuns in their white khadi sarees against the spiral staircase, suggesting something of an existential dilemma, created a picture of the barest elements that was the essence of S. Paul.
In the early 2000s, an exhibition on the nation at National Museum, ‘Middle Age Spread: India 1947-2004’ presented another kind of challenge. Cartier-Bresson had effectively captured the eviscerating aftermath of Partition, Nehru’s address from Teen Murti, the heaving, mourning crowds at Gandhi’s death.
The photographers who represented the early 70s, notably Raghu Rai and Kishore Parekh, had captured the Indira era — the Bangladesh war, India’s colossal victory, as well as Indira’s deification. Both photo editors of leading dailies, who had fought for column space for visuals, Rai and Parekh represented a new generation of muscular, dynamic lensmanship in the thick of action with all its human interest.
Yet, the years of Nehruvian India, with its childlike slippage into the innocence of the nation, was a harder call. Here Paul, shooting from the fringes, a lone ranger with his lens, had stood, committed to this vision. Paul caught children at play, people in solemn prayer in a sea of collective worship, the migrant labourer’s infant alone on an acreage of bricks, like a cruel metaphor for the growing city. Images that constituted not the momentous, but time itself, a slow page-turner that constitutes a period of change.
Own truth
One of Paul’s most striking images was of the arrival of Indira Gandhi’s bullet-ridden body at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Typically, Paul does not show the horror but captures instead the symmetrical façade of the modernist building, its balconies crowded with patients who have leaned out to witness the scene below. He invited the viewer to read the moment, making the photograph a dialogic process. If what we have today is the boisterously touted “new” India with its noisy energies, then Paul was definitely “old” India, akin to the black and white film, the ghazal, the solitary pleasures of reading.
At the heart of such a practice, of course, lies Paul’s refusal — refusal to engage in the muscular photojournalism of younger photographers, refusal to travel, inhabiting instead his beloved Delhi and its environs with his lens. There was his resistance to the iconic subject, with a socialist commitment to the subaltern, the ordinary.
While so much photography from the subcontinent has expanded on the subject of poverty, Paul was careful to confer dignity on his subject. In much the same spirit, he devoted hours to explain his work to young photographers and artists. Over a period of 50 years, he adhered to his own truth of the human condition, all shot in slow time.
The author is an art critic and curator who, while preoccupied with her art website www.criticalcollective.in, is also contemplating a book on the Middle Ages.