Documentary Photography,Decolonization,and the Making of “Secular Icons”: Reading Sunil Janah’s Photographs from the 1940s through the 1950s

Abstract

Through historicizing photographs made by celebrated Indian photographer Sunil Janah (1918–2012), this paper will elucidate the ways in which Janah created “secular icons” of historical moments during India’s passage from the colonial to the postcolonial. I will primarily focus on two sets of Janah’s photographs: the first set is from the 1940s, and centers on the Bengal Famine of 1943, communal violence, and the displacement of population before and after the partition of 1947, while the second set is from the 1950s, and emphasizes in particular photo-documentations of independent India’s industrial growth during the first two five-year plans. Contrast between these two sets will focus on two distinct ways of becoming iconic, while also highlighting the politics of revival/retrospection and the ways in which particular genres of photographs are memorialized, while others remain relatively unknown. Later day viewers of Janah’s photographs have seen only the political import of his pre-independence photographs of the Bengal Famine (1943) and the post-Partition mass exodus, while I argue for a seamless continuity between Janah’s pre-Independence social-documentation and post-independence industrial photography. I further contend that Janah’s photographs were material traces of an indubitable reality that embodied and at the same time exceeded their ideological message.