How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition
Key takeaways
- It was wedding season, and the first night of the Ijtema, an annual gathering that had drawn thousands of Muslim pilgrims to the city.
- More than four decades later, the Bhopal gas tragedy remains the deadliest industrial disaster in human history.
- “Burial of an Unknown Child,” Bhopal, 1984.Rai was born in 1942, and began his career as a photojournalist in his twenties, at the Hindustan Times, an English-language broadsheet.
Imambara, Lucknow, circa 1992.Photographs by Raghu Rai / Magnum Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In the dark, predawn hours of December 3, 1984, a dense cloud of poisonous gas leaked from a pesticide plant and, borne on a soft, northern wind, enveloped Bhopal, a city in central India. It was wedding season, and the first night of the Ijtema, an annual gathering that had drawn thousands of Muslim pilgrims to the city. Celebrations were in full swing as the cloud descended on the metropolis in a thick, deadly fog that, owing to the presence of hydrogen cyanide, smelled of bitter almonds. Within minutes, revellers were gasping for breath; their nostrils quivered, their lips turned blue. Some ran from the fog, quickly depleting their last reserves of oxygen, and started to gulp lungfuls of toxic air. Others collapsed instantly. By the time the sun rose over the city, roughly three thousand people had died.
More than four decades later, the Bhopal gas tragedy remains the deadliest industrial disaster in human history. Researchers estimate that half a million people are still suffering long-term health consequences, including cases in which their lungs were permanently scarred by the chemicals, or irreversible damage to their legs left them unable to walk. The morning after the leak, toxins still hanging in the air, Raghu Rai, a photojournalist from Delhi, arrived in the city to document the aftermath of the disaster. Amid the chaos, Rai found a father burying his infant child, no more than a year or two old, in the shallow dirt. Rai approached with his camera, bent down, and snapped a closeup shot of the corpse, half covered in soil. The child’s eyes were swollen and milky, their mouth agape in a silent moan. At the top of the frame is the father’s veiny hand, tenderly brushing rubble away from the infant’s forehead.
A man carries the body of his dead wife past the plant that was the source of the toxic gas that killed her, 1984.That picture, “Burial of an Unknown Child,” became the defining image of the disaster, a depiction of tragedy so viscerally infused with loss that, even today, it appears on banners protesting the chemical company responsible, which has yet to make full amends for the incident. “Burial” is one of dozens of photos that Rai, who passed away last month, at the age of eighty-three, selected for his 2015 book “Picturing Time,” a kaleidoscopic compendium of work that spans fifty years and chronicles modern India through its formative decades, as it grappled with newfound statehood and the volatile forces of breakneck modernization.