A tale of two Indias

Two book launches, two photo exhibitions, and unchanging, ever-changing India.

For many years now, theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi's collection of old photographs in the capital has been one of the city's best-kept secrets.

Loath to share his thousands of pictures "" portraits, family groups, landscapes, architectural records, studio photographs "" with an aggressive media, or with other collectors, the personal archive has only rarely been shown for select viewing in New York, London and Delhi.

But now it gets an airing alongside equally rare photographs from the India Office Library in London, or those from Getty Images, pictures that publisher Pramod Kapoor started collecting and identifying at the turn of the 21st century for books on the maharajas (out last year), or another on the national freedom movement (to be published in early 2007).

Forming a substantial chunk of the "then" section of an exciting illustrated book (India Then & Now), launched on Thursday, at least some of those images are also on exhibit at India Habitat Centre. Later, an even larger selection of images from the book will be specially mounted at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2006, where India is the theme.

But closer home, in fact not very far from the Habitat "" in Dilli Haat "" another exhibition of photographs, also from a book, is being snapped up by buyers.

Rajan Kapoor's photographs (from Brahma's Pushkar, launched on Monday) capture the picturesque as well as the maverick moods of this pilgrimage town, but they are not period images (though it must be said, a few have been reproduced in the book).

If, on the one hand, there is little that is similar between the two books, on the other hand, there is a great deal of familiarity that emerges from their folios.

India, for instance, aims to balance the exoticness of the vintage pictures with a very contemporary view (and visuals) of a modern, if endearingly fascinating country.

Pushkar, of course, exists simultaneously in several centuries, bartering its way to trade at its annual camel fair, even as it brings visitors from around the world to encounter one of the most fascinating experiences that India has to offer.

If India is a record of India in print, Pushkar shows that little has actually changed on the ground, at least where the country's oldest pilgrimage centre is concerned.

In a sense, India with its reversible format (the eminently readable "now" section, authored byVir Sanghvi, starts from one end; while Rudrangshu Mukherjee's much more academic "then" section forms the other end) puts a new face to illustrated books, while Pushkar remains conventional to a great degree, even including the design.

If the early photographs by Felice A Beato, Samuel Bourne and Lala Deen Dayal are some of the more inspiring among the India images, Kapoor's aerial photographs, taken from a hot-air balloon, are the highlights in Pushkar.

Yet, neither book was easy to do. "In a sense," says Kapoor, "the book took only six months to make, but the first entry I have against pictures from the archives dates back to 2001. Since then, I have made every effort to ensure digital, original, even photocopies of pictures for our collection, and at some stage they must have started to collate into a distinct idea for a book on vintage material on India."

However, instead of relying on just nostalgia ("There's great charm in old pictures," admits Kapoor), he decided on "a modern, contemporary face" for the country as well, roping in some of the country's best-known photographers (many of whom work or have worked with news and current affairs magazines) for a visual view of a rapidly changing India.

"It wasn't an easy book to do," he sighs, hoping it will have, despite the net and email and SMS, "a shelf life of eight or 10 or even 15 years".

Many of Kapoor's fights were internal, addressing the creative demons of his own mind, "trying to remember, then sort through the thousands of images I had seen over the years", but where Rajan Kapoor and Aman Nath were concerned, sometimes the differences were critical to the outcome of the book.

Nath, by now an old Rajasthan hand (where he's done a lot of work both writing books as well as running heritage hotels) was inclined towards an encyclopaedic work, and Pushkar is at least as solid as the Gazetteers the British left behind as a record of their research and findings in each district.

"Nothing's been written on Pushkar since the Padma Purana," says Nath, who is convinced that a tectonic movement in Sirmour five thousand years ago marks the disappearance of the river Saraswati, becoming the absent wife of Brahma at the yagna in the mythological retelling.

Nath is no neo-religious convert and, if anything, could have been mistaken for a hippie some three decades ago when he first made it to Pushkar. What he is convinced of though, is the "democracy of Hinduism with its 30 million gods. No other religion gives you that," he argues, "Hinduism is a samarth religion where devotees can worship the peepul, or Hanuman, or any of the Devis, and still be on the same plane. Sufism too is our interpretation of Islam. Hindu devotees can worship in a church or a dargah, but which Muslim saint tells you to go pray at a Hindu temple?"

That perhaps is why Pushkar is verbose, why Rajan Kapoor, a businessman and hobby photographer, had to spend a longer time than he originally intended, doing what he now refers to as "record pictures", images that are mere visual aids to Nath's ready-reckoner on Pushkar and Brahma.

If he was unhappy at the large number of non-creative pictures being included in the book merely for the sake of reference, Rajan Kapoor also consciously avoided the picture cliches on Pushkar; "all those mela pictures", he snorts derisively.

"A fully illustrated book creates a lot of excitement when it's published," he says, "but when there's a mix of pictures as well as lots of well-researched text, it has a longer shelf life."

But he wasn't always happy with the suggestion of a text-heavy tome: "When two people work together, and neither is dominant, sometimes there will be differences of opinion."

Whether it's Rajan Kapoor's pictures or Aman Nath's pro-Hindutva commentary, or even Pramod Kapoor's eclectic (but given the range, perhaps equally selective) editing of pictures, both books are extremely solid additions to the year-end list of books-to-buy.

Yet, if there's one image that stands out (and certainly not for its creativity), it is a photograph of Playboy bunny Katy Mirza, who fired the minds of all teenagers and young adults in the seventies.

Neither Mallika Sherwat now, nor the stunning nude picture of Indian cabaret dancer Arimand Bano from Alkazi's collection, taken in the 1920s, has the same cache "" and only because, ultimately, an image is only as important as the nostalgia it evokes.

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INDIA THEN & NOW

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Vir Sanghvi

Photo editing by Pramod Kapoor

Lustre Press/ Roli Books

308 pages,

Rs 2,975

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BRAHMA'S PUSHKAR, ANCIENT INDIAN PILGRIMAGES

by Aman Nath

Photographs by Rajan Kapoor

India Book House

204 pages,

Rs 1,800