A predictable catalogue in lieu of a book

India is one of the most confounding countries to make sense of, describe or attempt to disseminate.For everything as it appears, there is another quite contradictory view, and nothing is at it seems. But if India is capricious, her images are more so: each revealing layers of truths with hidden meanings.

Photographer Prashant Panjiar's task as photo editor, therefore, of "definitive" India images must have been his most difficult assignment ever, all the more so because it is as likely to attract opprobrium as dialogue, dissent and debate. Can 75 images tell of the struggles and successes of a period of photography from 1858 to 2004? Can it even attempt to do so?

Panjiar circumscribes that elusive "decisive moment" or "defining image" as something used so often by the media that it becomes famous by association. In other words, the picture signifies the event itself.

Nowhere is this better represented than in the image by Raghu Rai of Bhopal's Union Carbide gas leak. The photograph of a child's face buried under rubble, a hand tenderly brushing away the dirt from its unseeing eyes, is one of the most evocative images of any industrial disaster anywhere in the world.

Phoolan Devi's surrender (Sondeep Shankar), Pakistan's ignominous defeat in 1971 (DPR Photo Division), Nehru's swearing in as India's first prime minister (Homai Vyarawalla) are all representative of Panjiar's quest to homologate the representative image that qualifies India.

The expected, therefore, is the reason why the book fails. A viewer, like any reader, does not wish for the foretold. If the next page does not bring with it its twists and turns of the heart-wrenchingly unexpected, than it simply fails to deliver.

Only a few pages into this book, and already you know that you will find here images of the Babri Masjid just before its fall (D Ravinder Reddy), of the flaming Sabarmati Express at Godhra (Associated Press), of Naseeruddin pleading for his life during the Gujarat riots (Arko Dutta), and because Panjiar has found the space for the frivolous too, perhaps even Sushmita Sen or Aishwarya Rai bagging the beauty crown (he includes Sushmita Sen).

The whole point of these pictures is that too many have become so associated with the event as to have become less than the event itself, undernourished by too much exposure, bringing nothing new despite their association with a "definitive" moment. Are these pictures too few? Should they have been, perhaps, part of a larger collection? Or should they not have been a book, but a catalogue instead?

Panjiar does not restrict himself to merely current affairs but takes a broad sweep across what he calls "national consciousness", part of which happen to be romantic images of a stereotypical India at its most exotic "" Henri-Cartier Bresson's Kashmiri women, Steve McCurry's steam engine in front of the Taj Mahal and Raghubir Singh's diver off the ghats of Banaras represent this genre.

In quite another category are other memorable pictures that cause you to chuckle, such as Raghu Rai's photograph of Indira Gandhi in her office surrounded by her sycophantic cabinet, of Bresson's captivating image of Nehru and Edwina sharing a joke while Mountbatten looks grim, or of a beefcake Sachin Tendulkar at age five, bat in hand.

Unfortunately, again, the predictability of the selection makes you want to skip the pages in search of something more fresh. A chunk devoted to cinema stills, portraits and TV artistes, for all its relevance, is inexplicable.

Panjiar may well have to justify his selection time and again, and no doubt friends and critics will both offer viable alternatives, or point to slipped opportunities. But it is Panjiar again who supplies the book with some of its most defining images "" that of Naga sadhus rushing into the waters at Sangam in Allahabad, and of the unfurling Indian flag at Hindon in India's fiftieth year of independence.

Even though both have been published earlier, this is the stuff of picture books, not a historical cataloguing that is best left to the devices of the government's Photo Division.

As for Khushwant's Singh's introduction, it is like much of his writing in the last decade: to be read and forgotten. Instantly.

India, The Definitive Images
Photo Editor: Prashant Panjiar
Introduction: Khushwant Singh
Penguin/Viking
Pages: 167
Price: Rs 1250