Staying in focus

This man is the proud owner of a slice of Indian history – cartons of historic pictures bequeathed to him by one of India's first photojournalists. Nilima Pathak met him.

Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Edwina and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Jacqueline Kennedy, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi... These are just some of the most famous people Kulwant Roy, one of the first photo Journalists of India, captured on film.

But one of the most prized images in this huge collection is arguably a rare historic picture of Gandhi in a heated discussion with Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

"Uncle shot that in 1939,'' says Aditya Arya, the beneficiary of Roy's picture collection, wading through cartons of photographs and negatives of India and its leaders taken by Roy during and after British rule.

Arya, a photographer, is in his studio in Gurgaon, Haryana, busy archiving these pictures which are a goldmine in terms of historical evidence of Indian history dating back to the 1930s.

"It is a mammoth task because the images are very sensitive,'' he says. "There are cartons and cartons of pictures. Unfortunately, many photographs and negatives are stuck together. The time I wasted in not bothering to have a look at them for more than two decades has left them in a bad shape. At the moment, I am documenting the ones that are in good condition. The ones that need restoration are being kept separately."

Roy, whom Aditya fondly refers to as uncle, was a close family friend of the Aryas and the tale of how he came into possession of this wonderful slice of history reads almost like a fairy tale:

"Uncle was born in Lahore in 1914, when the city was part of British India. As a teenager he enjoyed taking pictures and used to work in Gopal Chitra Kutir, a studio owned by my mother's family who also lived in Lahore at the time. That's how he became so close to my family,'' says Aditya.

"In the early '40s, he landed a job as photographer with the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) and trained as an aerial photographer. His postings took him to Ambala, Quetta and Peshawar."

Sometime during the Second World War, Roy left Lahore for Delhi where he set up a studio, Associated Press Photo, in Old Delhi's Mori Gate. It was while he was here that he got a lot of opportunities to capture on film what are now unforgettable moments in India's history.

"My father, Vedagya Arya was a professor in St. Stephen's College. My mother, who left Lahore and came to India along with some members of her family, was a teacher in Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and St. Xavier's, in Delhi.

"Uncle used to visit us regularly during the '60s when I was a school boy. Every year, he would take me along to watch the Republic Day Parade. I remember him regaling me with stories about his travels and all the famous people whom he photographed or met in the course of his profession.

"I think all that must have had some influence on me because when I grew up, my interest in photography increased.''

After completing his schooling in 1976, Arya worked with Roy. "Around that time, uncle was diagnosed with cancer. He died a decade later when I was trying to establish myself as a photographer. I have the last picture that he took. It was of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in New Delhi and it remained in the camera which he gave me," says Arya. Apart from the camera, Roy also bequeathed Arya all the pictures that he clicked in his lifetime. "He left them for me because he knew I had a passion for photos and photography and also because he was sure I would look after them,'' says Arya, a bachelor, who seems to have set aside his life for the restoration of these valuable pictures.

Although Arya knew that the cartons were full of pictures, he had little time to examine them as he was busy working. "But I used to take them along with me to all the rented homes and studios that I moved to over all these years.

"But one day in December 2007, I opened one of the boxes and gasped. The wonderful pictures overwhelmed me,'' he recalls.

It did not take him long to make up his mind: he would spend the rest of his life restoring the pictures.

"Along with a team of three, I am working almost 18 hours a day to record and preserve a remarkable photographic record of modern Indian history including thousands of images from the last days of the British Raj, many of which have not been published.

"The 1939 picture of Gandhi in an argument with Jinnah is one of the rarest. The two were seldom photographed together, especially when they disagreed. The photo was part of the Hulton Archive Getty Images, one of the world's largest photo agencies. It was credited to a 'stringer' for Topical Press, a now-defunct London news service.''

One day when Arya was flipping through Peter Ruhe's book on Gandhi, he found the famous image there. It was credited to Hulton Getty, with no mention of Roy.

Arya immediately contacted a curator at Hulton Getty who said the agency would be happy to credit that picture to Roy once the facts were verified.

"That was very simple. In the image that they had used, Liaquat Ali had been cropped out. The original that I had showed Liaquat along with Gandhi and Jinnah. Thus, after verification, the image has been credited to Kulwant Roy. This has happened 70 years late," Arya says.

Similarly, several photographs that Roy sold to international news agencies during his lifetime are now found in archival collections but none is credited to him.

A costly affair

"Restoration work is expensive,'' says Arya. "Some restorers charge $500 to $2,000 to restore just one photograph. Many people tell me that the work I do is usually done by a large institution. We have already sorted, catalogued and archived about 5,000 photographs and spent close to Rs15 lakh on it."

He has set up work stations, acquired state-of-the-art equipment all to ensure that no image would be lost or destroyed. The ones to be restored would require huge resources. "One small error and we might destroy the image, because chemicals are used for restoration. And due to negligence, the photographs and negatives have already become so fragile," Arya explains.

"When we began, we thought it would take two months to catalogue the entire lot. But now after more than six months we are still nowhere near the finishing mark. It might take a year to complete the task," he says.

Arya has been approached by several institutions who have offered to buy the photographs and negatives. Some have offered to take the images abroad and archive them. But the photographer has decided never to let the 'jewels' go outside the country.

Has he considered approaching a government agency and handing them the images for restoration?

I wouldn't want to hand this over to anybody, he says. "No one will understand the emotions behind it. It is my family's treasure trove, the history of our country and the single largest collection of its kind in the country.

"Everything else has to wait," he says, underscoring the urgency to archive the images. "Moreover, there are people supporting me financially. Together we plan to set up an institution which would house archives of photographs of this country. Some day the records should be available to students and institutions and maybe even on a website. I am working towards it and intend calling it 'Kulwant Roy Archives'.''

Early days

Arya started as a travel photographer in 1980 and worked as a photo-editor for Swagat, the Indian Airlines magazine in 1991-92.

"I have also done a few coffee table books and for the last 20 years have been into advertising photography. I shoot for hotels worldwide and have corporate clients," he says.

Although Roy did partly influence Arya in choosing photography
as a career, he dissuaded him from entering the profession. 'He would always tell me 'anything but photography,' says Arya. And he had a reason that is related to an incident that happened some time in the late '50s.

Roy, says Arya, went on a three-year world photography tour covering 40 countries. "He must have clicked several hundred photographs and created a body of work that would have provided him with a tidy sum of money. After he completed his tour, he posted all the rolls of film that he had exposed to his studio address in India.

"But when he arrived home, he found that none of the packets had reached. Unbelievably, all the rolls which he had sent went missing. For months he kept hunting for the packets, knocking on all doors, seeking information from all possible sources. He placed advertisements in local newspapers offering a reward for the safe return of the packets. He even rummaged through garbage bins near post offices. But he failed to trace even one roll. A project like that, his lifetime work, was gone," says Arya.

"Uncle was such a careful man and this was a very careless thing to do. Of course, those days thefts were not common and it would never have crossed his mind that things could get lost in transit.

"But to his credit, uncle appeared not to dwell on the issue for too long. He was not remorseful and dismissed the incident as minor. But I can tell you it was a huge setback for him. He did not disclose his emotions, except to just a couple of people very close to him. But yes, he had taken it to heart.

It broke his heart and some time after this incident, he faded into obscurity.

"Sensing what he must have gone through, one can understand why he dissuaded me from becoming a photographer. He had faced a lot of hardships and he died virtually penniless.''

Having avowed to get his uncle the recognition that is his due, Arya says, "He was a true photo journalist. While going through the cartons of pictures I came across a diary, written by him during his travels. It mentioned how he chalked out his entire itinerary to New York on board the ship, how he obtained permission to shoot in several restricted areas..."

It also revealed an aspect of Roy's life that few in his family had known. "While in Japan, he had become friendly with a Japanese woman. I found the letters she wrote to him. There is also a copy of an affidavit sponsoring her visit to India. But for some reason, she never came and the relationship ended. I guess it had something to do with him losing the film rolls.''

Apart from archiving the images, Aditya is also working on a book on photography. He also intends holding an exhibition of these rare gems.

"The book will have history, weaving in the whole nationalist movement.

I have spoken to several historians about the significance of the photographs.

"The archive has excited historians who believe it may shed new light on key moments in India's Independence movement. And 200-300 years from now, when people try to reconstruct the times gone by, the records will come in handy."

– Nilima Pathak is a writer based in New Delhi.