'Agli Baar, Raghu': A Promise I Could Not Keep

There are people whose absence you feel before you've even processed the news. This is one of those mornings.

I am not going to talk about the decades of work, the images that became part of how we understand this country, the workshops, the generations he shaped. Others will write that, and they should. I want to tell you about the man I knew. The one who across thirty-five years always made me feel like a son and a friend in the same breath. Photography was always part of what we talked about, but it was never the reason we wanted to be in the same place.

He had been photographing since the sixties, decades before I had even found my way into this practice. I came into photography in a world he had already helped shape, carrying his images somewhere in the back of my mind the way you carry things that formed you before you knew they were forming you. But what surprised me every single time we sat across from each other was that he never made you feel that distance. He was larger than life and so far ahead, and yet he talked to you like the years between you simply didn’t exist.

What I always found myself hungry for was not his pictures. It was him. He had documented a post-independence India that is simply gone now. What did Delhi feel like before it became this. Was Banaras less of a performance then, less aware of its own image, a place that hadn’t yet learned to pose for the lens. What was Calcutta like when Satyajit Ray was still walking its streets. He had been there. He had seen it.delhi photography circles raghu rai

Yes, he photographed Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi, Pandit Ravi Shankar and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and countless more across a lifetime of work that spanned every corner of this country and beyond. But his most extraordinary work was never about the famous. It was about the everyday. The person who didn’t know they were being seen. That, I think, was where he was most himself.

A photograph, whoever made it, is always a mirror. It shows you how you see. But sitting with Raghu and talking about his images was something else entirely. That was a window. To a world only he had been inside. And hearing him talk about what he carried from those places, what the camera could never fully hold, that was the most precious thing. The most precious deconstruct you could ever have of a man and his life’s work.

And then there was the other Raghu. The one who would grab your hair and look enormously pleased with himself.

Some years ago we found ourselves on a television show together. A photography competition, grand finale, the works. He had been called in as the special judge. I was already on the panel. Somewhere between five in the evening and seven, when the shoot still hadn’t begun for reasons that only television can produce, someone decided that since I knew Raghu well enough, I should keep him company.

There may have been others around, but what I remember is finding him in the vanity van, a bottle of whiskey appearing, and the evening settling into something easy and warm. I am not a whiskey drinker. I was not one then either. He knew this. He looked at me with that look and said, “Aaj to peelo, agli baar aapke liye wine mangayenge.” Today at least drink, next time we’ll get wine for you. So I drank. The shoot kept getting delayed. The whiskey kept getting shorter. We were happy.

When we finally got to the floor, the cameras were rolling, the young photographers were standing there carrying the full weight of that moment, and somewhere in the middle of the elaborate television build-up to the announcement, Raghu said it. Loudly. Clearly. In Hindi. “Yeh der kis baat ki.” What is all this delay for. We know who won. Let’s just tell them and let them get on with their lives.

I laughed. The other judge laughed. The young photographers, nervous as they were, smiled. The producers behind the camera must have aged several years in that single second. That was him. He had what in Hindi, in Urdu, in Punjabi we call Junoon. That particular madness which keeps you going no matter what stands in your way. Not people pleasing. Not negotiating with the world. Just that stubborn, burning need to be true. It is what made him speak up. That Junoon is what you see in every frame he ever made. So completely, unmistakably his.

The next time we’ll get wine for you never came. I stopped drinking in 2019 and whenever we met after that he would remind me, you still haven’t kept that promise, we never had that drink. It became our joke. Our standing, unfinished thing.

I found a WhatsApp message from June 2018 this morning. R U free on 14th evening... 7.30 at IIC bar...?....RR. He signed it RR. Like a telegram. I had said yes. Something came in the way. Something always comes in the way.

I wish I had had that one last drink with him. Just that one. Just to keep the promise.

Raghu Rai. What a man. What an extraordinary, irreplaceable man.

Samar Jodha is a Photographer and artist based in Delhi

Views expressed are personal