Writing about the place where you grew up is a bit like writing about your mum. If you are too effusive, people shake their heads: “The boy loves his mother”. If you try and be more objective, they again shake their heads: “There’s obviously some issue there”.What does it mean to photograph Bengal? What makes Bengal Bengal? There are, of course, answers. A land that stretches from the high mountains to the sea. A land of poets. Of romantics, of rebels. A land of festivals, baro mashe tero parbon, as we say in Bangla. Dignity amidst decay. Decay amidst great beauty. Like most clichés, there’s a nugget of truth in each.AdvertisementIt’s true that many of us wrote poetry at some point in our lives, with mixed success — or unmixed unsuccess. It’s true that many of us flirted with revolutionary ideologies, sometimes without being able to separate between our desire for change in the world and a yearning for redemption from the deadening mundaneness of our lives. So did our parents, and their parents. Before the peasant revolution, there was the fight against the British; before that, there was Young Bengal and the fight against traditional social mores. Beef bones were thrown into homes of the conservatives; guns were fired, not always at the right British official; Gandhiji had to use all of his moral authority to keep Bengal from straying off his non-violent path to independence, and it did not always work. When I was a child, young men from middle-class families went underground; one heard rumours of them showing up at midnight, disguised as a sadhu, to be blessed by their mother before disappearing again into the dark. Along with poetry, violence is all too often part of our tradition.At the same time, it is also true that we seem to live from festival to festival: From Saraswati Puja to dol, from poila boishakh to Durga Puja, from Kali Puja to Christmas, with many more in between.And it is true that there is a lot of decay. At least in the years when I was growing up, the debris of British rule was everywhere. Calcutta was the first city of the Empire; it was where the colonists built their shops and factories, their swankiest mansions, snootiest clubs. When they left, first to the new capital in Delhi and especially after Independence, all that started to unravel. Decay comes fast in wet and tropical Bengal.AdvertisementAt the same time, the small minority of Indians favoured by the colonists, the zamindars, the box-wallahs, and their many hangers-on, was drowning in the rising tide of new people and new pressures unleashed by Independence. Their sinking fortunes set off skirmishes over what remained.But there was heroism, too. Men from these families seemed, all too often, totally unable to react to what was happening to them, beyond shouting, screaming and drinking too much. It was their wives and sisters who fought back, determined to never give up their dignity and to protect their families at all cost. That, too, I remember.Much art, photography, music and literature in Bengal’s recent past was inspired by one or more of these narratives. And some of it is wonderful. But Raghu Rai, who knows Bengal well — he worked for The Statesman and then for Sunday — was never entirely seduced by any of them.I was an admirer of Raghuji’s work since I happened on his photographs in Sunday, sometime in the 1970s. His book on Kolkata made me nostalgic; his book on Bangladesh haunted me for years. One impression that stayed with me from these photographs is that of common people displaying uncommon strength. Not so much the muscle strength of the boatman’s taut body — though there is that too — but more the inner strength of people who have keep going in the face of extreme adversity. People escaping the Bangladesh war, pushing those who can no longer move on their own, carrying them if needed. A man looking out from his home inside a sewer pipe; women gathered to mourn the dead in Bhopal; grieving fathers carrying their children.What stands out in these pictures is the gaze of the subjects. There are, of course, those who could not care less whether they are being photographed are not. But then there are the many whom Raghuji photographs looking straight at the camera. What is striking is their expression, which goes from the stoical to the dismissive or even contemptuous — never the usual smile of gratitude or the pride in being chosen. Who are you to come asking about my tragedy, what can you understand about the depth of my pain, they seem to be asking. Raghuji does not shy away from that challenge. He captures it so often that it is clear that it is something he values, a part of the photographer’s duty as he sees it, perhaps as a way to get us to deepen our empathy, to transcend the Pavlovian reward system of grateful smiles and bowing acceptance. We need to do things for the world because of our inner compulsion for justice, we need to admire those in pain for the strength that allows them to bear it.It is perhaps not accidental that another of Rai’s great interests is in trees. Trees are strong, trees do not crave admiration. Rai is one of the great photographers of trees, which is also a favourite subject of the great Ansel Adams as well as of one of my other favourites, Tokihiro Sato.In this sense, while Bengal featured often in Rai’s past work, Bengal was less the subject and more a site where people were confronted with extraordinary tragedies that provided the backdrop for the display of strength that is his main subject, much like there are locations where his trees live, but he is less interested in them than in the trees themselves. His new book is more clearly about Bengal, in its diversity, in its many moods. It is today’s (pre-Covid) more prosperous Bengal, with its shopping malls and cellphones, shiny billboards and skyscrapers, its new anxieties, its changing aspirations. The roof on the Ganges where, many years ago, he had filmed a group of bodybuilders, is still there, but there is just one bodybuilder in the recent photo. Is this a comment on our busier times?you may likeMost importantly, however, this book is about searching for the appropriate palette for Bengal, and it is very clear what Rai’s answer is: Bengal is green and grey, with accents of pink, red and orange. The green shades from almost blue all the way to a brazen yellow, while the grey goes from the brilliant off-white of a post-rain cloud to the brooding steel-blue of a monsoon sky.There is always drama in Bengal, Rai seems to be implying: Sometimes it is in people’s faces, but sometimes it is mother nature herself who delivers it.The writer, an economist, is a Nobel laureateIn 2020, at Raghu Rai’s request, Banerjee wrote this as a preface for the photographer’s proposed book on West Bengal. That book was not published. Rai passed away on April 26. Edited excerpts