Ram Dhamija: 1922 - 2010

As a writer and photojournalist, Ram Dhamija had a first hand view of the period when independent India was in a state of transition which he effectively captures with his camera. Ram also worked with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in the Press Information Bureau, a job that took him all over the country, armed with his camera. In addition, he put together a rich collection of images of performers and craftspeople as he traversed India with his wife Jasleen Dhamija, an international expert in textiles, handicrafts and living traditions.

His son Himman curated the exhibition in New Delhi last year, "Preoccupations: Forty Years of Imaging India", after sifting through literally hundreds of dusty negatives. In the process, says Himman, "I have discovered a mind which was constantly exploring ideas -- and has therefore produced images which continue to resonate today."

It is the silent pulse of history of a nation walking towards a promising dawn that we hear beating beneath these arresting images. The photographs are portrayals of the quotidian moment and of quotidian lives, several with wit and a tinge of humour. There's no big drama here nor are there any oh-my-gosh pictorial epiphanies. No tricks of technology but the magic of the moment frozen in time.

You see the big story behind the little stories: a highway in Rajasthan in the 1960s, a man with a child in a drought-ravaged Rajasthan in 1969, a pucca sahib in a suit and hat with a pipe in his mouth inspecting a canal in Punjab in the early 1950s, architect Le Corbusier at a construction site in Chandigarh in the 1950s, a soldier in Ladakh in 1962 during the India-China war, sadhus at a Kumbh mela in 1954, MF Husain painting outside Jama Masjid in the 1970s, a sequence of images of the legendary Balasaraswati dancing, up close and personal.

You also see a relatively young Indira Gandhi in 1968 in Bhutan with hair made untidy by a stubborn wind, a coat casually flung over her shoulders like a woman of the world. Dhamija has caught her in an indeterminate mood -- a hint of both a frown and a smile on a face more filled out than we are used to seeing and a chin not so sharply defined as it came to be later.

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