Sunil Janah : Chronicling Life
Shabari Choudhury
The transformation of a photograph into an iconic image often takes place in retrospect. A photograph derives meaning as much from what is absent or left out as from what is present or captured within the frame. Choosing the ‘right’ moment in the continuum of time is perhaps what ultimately determines the fate of a photograph, as an iconic image that outlives its producers or one that is easily forgotten with time. This couldn’t be truer for documentary photography and photo journalism. In both cases, image taking depends entirely on the chosen moment, a choice exercised by the photographer. A photographer who exercised this choice par excellence was Sunil Janah. Janah rose to prominence with his hard-hitting coverage of the 1943 Bengal famine. His images of the aftermath of a catastrophe that claimed millions in Bengal shocked the nation to its core.
Born in Assam in 1918, Janah belonged to a middle class Kolkata (then Calcutta) family with familial ties to the Medinipur district of West Bengal. During his student days at the Presidency College, Calcutta, Janah dabbled in amateur photography and had every intention of becoming a journalist till he met P.C Joshi, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI). A member of the CPI’s student wing, Janah was already involved in left-wing politics when he was asked by P.C Joshi to document the Bengal famine. The politically charged atmosphere of the nation coupled with his personal left-leanings led to Janah’s quitting academics and following Joshi who intended to do reportage on the famine. It was on this journey that Janah came in contact with the artist Chittaprosad Bahattacharya who’s sketches of the hunger struck land were published alongside Janah’s photographs in the Indian Communist Party’s paper, People’s War and its sister concerns worldwide. Emaciated, skeleton-like family portraits, a dog chewing on a human corpse and skeletons scattered over the wasteland are some poignant images taken by Janah that have branded the famine as the worst man-made calamity in our collective memory.
