Photographer Margaret Bourke-White was on hand during the independence movement and Partition to capture an era of this country’s history. Malavika Karlekar reviews a book on her life and work
If you’ve ever wondered about the striking, determined blonde with a camera played by Candice Bergen in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, Pramod Kapoor’s book based on the Getty Images archives has the answers. In 1946, Margaret Bourke-White was appointed by Life to photograph the exchange of populations that followed Partition. By then she was known as a talented photographer with energy, initiative and, of course, the brashness and nerves of steel to elbow her way in. Photography critic’s Vicki Goldberg’s biography of Bourke-White introduces us to a woman who had the looks, charm and acumen to entertain at the same table “Hindu nationalists, Moslem separatists, Communists, British diplomats, and maharajahs”. Photographer Sunil Janah became her assistant and well-known journalist Frank Moraes fell hopelessly in love with her.
When Bourke-White arrived in March 1946, she knew that photographing Mahatma Gandhi was a priority; she quickly learnt how to spin — a requirement stipulated by his implacable secretary — and took an image that has been “endlessly reproduced”: the Mahatma poring over papers on his lap while the spinning wheel occupies the left foreground. The photographer was to go on to take many more shots of the man who affectionately called her “the torturer”. Soon, Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Direct Action Day found her in the “fetid alleys of Calcutta (Kolkata) photographing the dead and dying in various stages of decomposition. A year later, at “the stroke of the midnight hour” as India was awakening to freedom, Bourke-White was to be photographing a land torn apart in horrific scenes that were “straight out of the Old Testament”. In Halfway to Freedom, Bourke-White wrote, “While I traveled with the migration, my respect for Moses grew, for I glimpsed the colossal problem he had to solve. But these people had no Moses”.
Clearly, for Bourke-White, neither Gandhi nor Jinnah was the Moses that a violent, confused people needed; yet, she clearly had immense respect for the Mahatma whom she likened to a “great white mushroom on legs, under the huge wet Turkish towel on his head”. Her photographs of his prayer meetings, of him on his last fast, and walking in Sabarmati Ashram are not only brilliant in their composition and use of chiaroscuro, but also make the viewer feel that she could have been one of the crowd. At a meeting, as Gandhiji stands with his hands folded, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur shares an aside with Sushila Nayar. She has noticed someone in the crowd and shares this with the younger woman. Legitimate distraction amidst solemnity is captured in this image that also uses large portions of a darkening sky as backdrop effectively. And as a fasting Mahatma lies amidst supporters, Bourke-White’s lens does not miss his fingers that clutch papers and the glint behind his famous spectacles as he listens to a visitor.
Bourke-White’s portraits capture the rich and the famous. Some might not have been too pleased with the outcome: various maharajas at the Chamber of Princes, some more awake than others; Subhas Chandra Bose smiling self-consciously; Bhimrao Ambedkar looking a little suspicious while Jawaharlal Nehru strikes a pose with a cigarette in an elegant holder and Jinnah’s “deep-sunk eyes” are “pinpoints of excitement”. Begum Raana, the Hindu wife of Liaquat Ali, first prime minister of Pakistan, is clearly pleased with her hand at bridge and it could hardly be accidental that Bourke-White chose to photograph the Turkish wife of Azam Jah, heir to the last Nizam of Hyderabad, in front of a huge embossed wall image of India.
Such portraits were either commissioned or taken with due permission if not willing compliance. This was rarely true of “those too weak to go on”, who lay down to await “death in a swarm of flies”. In fact, Lee Eitington, a journalist who went to the Punjab with Margaret Bourke-White in August 1947, commented that the photographer had no compunction in asking a group of terrified refugees to repeat their action of flight time and again until she felt that she had the right images. Eitington protested and when Bourke-White asked her to give them some money, said that that was not what was needed — the people had to move on. Wryly, the less hardened journalist commented, “that’s why she was such a good photographer. People were dying under her feet. She thought herself a great humanitarian, but when it came to individual people...”
Witness to Life and Freedom provides us a well-chosen sampling of the work of a woman of genius, and also of her less than charming traits — traits that could only in part be attributed to the mandate of photojournalism. And Gopalkrishna Gandhi has contributed a brief though nicely written foreword.
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Where the book falls short is in its rather arbitrary organisation and occasional howlers. The viewer’s anticipation is built up after Gandhiji’s fast on January 12, 1948 — but the next page shifts inexplicably to Telengana and one has to wait till the end of the book to know that Bourke-White was possibly the last to interview and photograph Gandhi, on January 29, the day before the Mahatma was assassinated. Pagination is given short shrift — an annoying tendency nowadays among ‘picture’ books — and there is a mix-up in the names and genders of Devdas Gandhi’s children. International Communist ideologue Rajani Palme Dutt is introduced rather inelegantly as “A leading journalist in the Communist Party of the Great Britain”. Clearly, these obvious errors should have been avoided by such a well-established editor-publishing house combine.
Malavika Karlekar edits the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She is the author of Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915
WITNESS TO LIFE AND FREEDOM
MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN
Editor: Pramod Kapoor
Publisher: Roli
Pages: 144
Price: Rs 595
