Through the looking glass: Ad photographer Aditya Arya

Mamaji, as I called Kulwant Roy, was a family friend who was very close to me. He was a bachelor all his life, and used to be at our house everyday. He gave me these images before he died and said, 'do something about it'. These guys had a tough life.

They were like losers. He never made any money, and was an unrecognised pioneer with a vagabond existence, but being perpetually on the move is every photographer's dream. Except for personal satisfaction, there was nothing in photography.
 
But he is the guy who inspired me, who made photography my passion. When I started clicking 28 years back, there was no money in the profession. I'm now trying to establish a platform where other photographers can archive and preserve their work for future generations to study and appreciate our culture and history.

There's only one organisation that preserves photo archives, the Alkazi Foundation, and those pictures are all 19th century works. If school children saw Roy's glimpses, their whole perspective towards history would change. Often, historians interpret history out of hearsay. I would like to narrate history through visuals.

Viewfinder
Born in 1914, Kulwant Roy started his career in the Thirties. In 1938, he documented the visit of Gandhi to meet Khan Adbul Ghafar Khan in the North West Frontier Province. Roy joined the Royal Indian Air Force in Kohat near Quetta in 1941 where he was able to use his newly acquired skills to take aerial shots from the cockpits of planes.

Headstrong and patriotic, Roy found it difficult to tolerate the discriminatory policies of his British superiors and had to leave the air force after being court martialed. He then set up Associated Press Photos with Lalit Gopal in Mori gate. Restless and searching, the camera never left the side of Kulwant Roy.

In 1958, he left India for three years on a sudden whim to travel across the world. Before leaving, he made lists of pictures that he could carry with him. These images of India were very different from what he had photographed for newspapers, and he would market them in the West. His photographs of pilgrimages, religious events, ethnic costumes and the snow capped mountains of Kashmir eventually found their way in scores of picture stories in different languages of the world. 

He also took photographs in the 20 countries he visited, and all these images funded this early global traveller. In 1963, Roy put all his prints and negatives together in boxes and mailed them to his address in Delhi. On his return, none of them had reached. Broken in spirit, he was to spend the last years of his life scouting post offices and hunting for the boxes in the garbage dumps of Delhi.

History in the Making
On till: October 21
Where: Exhibition Hall, Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, entry from Man Singh Road