by ROBIN KHUNDKAR
Sunil Janah in 1998 PHOTO/Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
I had the honor speaking with Mr. Janah on the phone when I called him a few years ago at the request of Mr. Mofidul Haque of the MukitiJuddho (Liberation War) Musuem of Bangladesh. He had promised to donate a few prints of his photos of the 1943 Bengal Famine to the Museum. He was very gracious despite being gravely ill and nearly blind. Unfortunately, his illness and death of his daughter I was unable to follow up and get the prints. His photgraphs will live forever. His pictures on the famine amd tribals of India are masterpieces.
Below is his obituary and an article reviewing the 1998 Manahttan Exhibition of his work.
Sunil Janah, who chronicled India in photographs, dies at 94
by HAERSH PANDYA
Sunil Janah, an Indian photographer who achieved international fame with his pictures of the famine that devastated Bengal in 1943 and 1944, died on June 21 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 94.
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His photographs of the famine, published in People’s War, the journal of the Communist Party of India, revealed horrors that had been barely reported in the mainstream press, which was censored by the British authorities. As the critic Vicki Goldberg wrote in The New York Times in 1998, reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Janah’s work at the Gallery at 678 in Manhattan, his pictures showed “lines of emaciated people waiting for food, groups of skeletons, hungry dogs gnawing at human bones.” Postcards of these images were sent around the world to raise funds.
“Unlike other photographers,” said Ram Rahman, the curator of that exhibition, “Janah was an active political worker whose political work happened to be photography.”
The New York Times for more
Looking at India’s Upheaval From the Inside (and the Side)
by VICKI GOLDBERG
In almost every country, photographers picked up cameras and recorded people and events as a matter of course. Many of these dutiful guardians of history remained unknown outside their nation’s borders, some almost unknown within them. Often enough the local talent, like Martin Chambi in Peru or Seydou Keita in Mali, photographers in countries that had been isolated or colonized or only made highly visible in the industrialized West by visiting photographers, have only recently been discovered by foreigners. Much has been written in our day suggesting that such photographers might see things differently from occupying powers or relative strangers.
A case in point is the work of Sunil Janah, an 80-year-old Indian photographer whose work during World War II, the struggle for independence and the postwar years in India is little known in the United States but highly regarded in his native land, where a limited number of images have been shown repeatedly. Now more than 300 of his photographs, many never exhibited or published anywhere before, are on view in ”Sunil Janah: Photographing India 1942-1978” at the Gallery at 678 in the East Village.
The New York Times for more