New Delhi: Raghu Rai, one of India’s best-known photographers whose lens captured India in its many shades, died at a private hospital here in the early hours of Sunday, April 26. He was 83.
“Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer two years ago, but he was cured. Then it spread to the stomach, which was cured. Recently, the cancer spread to his brain and then there were age-related issues too,” Nitin Rai, photographer and Rai’s son, told news agency PTI.
He is survived by his wife Gurmeet, son Nitin and daughters Lagan, Avani and Purvai.
The last rites will be performed at Lodhi Crematorium at 4 pm on Sunday.
An accidental beginning
Rai came to photography by chance. A civil engineer by training, he picked up a camera during a visit to his photographer brother S Paul in Delhi in the 1960s. One of his earliest shots – a donkey staring into the lens – was published in The Times of London, launching a career that would span seven decades.
A Padma Shri awardee (1972), Rai documented some of the defining moments of modern India, including the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale at the Golden Temple ahead of Operation Blue Star and the Emergency, during which he devised creative workarounds to bypass censorship.
A global standard
In 1977, Rai became the first Indian photographer invited to join the prestigious Magnum Photos collective, nominated by French master Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose humanist sensibility deeply influenced his work.
His prolific body of work, from the streets of Old Delhi to portraits of Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama, is preserved across numerous books. “I became an explorer of life,” he once said. That exploration is now complete, but the images it produced endure.
(With inputs from PTI)
