India Book

If either William Dalrymple or Salman Rushdie required a photographic companion to their writings on contemporary India, then surely it is this. Don McCullin's extraordinary new collection of photographs, India. Dalrymple's recent book The Age of Kali captures the darker, tumultuous side of modern India, a perfect counterpoint to Rushdie's celebration of the fertile chaos of post-war India, captured in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Both visions of India are brought to graphic life by McCullin, who claims that "If I had eternal life I would do eternal books about India". The book is broken down into short photographic essays, spanning three decades of McCullin's visits to India. As with his now classic collection Sleeping with Ghosts: A Life's Work in Photography, the images are consistently compelling, haunting and arresting. India moves from the horrific and agonising pictures of the refugee crisis in Bangladesh in the early 1970s, to extraordinary scenes of poverty and devotion at the festivals which punctuate the Hindu calendar. But McCullin retains his most personal and powerful images for the astonishing street life of 1990s Calcutta. Beggars, lepers, traders, the sick and the dying all stare back at us, imbued by McCullin with an extraordinary aura of humanity and dignity in the midst of despair and degradation. Time and again in his notes to the images, McCullin concedes his ambivalence towards a country which contains so much beauty and tranquillity, but which is also marked by poverty and suffering. But from this ambivalence emerges a truly beautiful collection of photographs. India is destined to become a classic. --Jerry BrottonRead More