Human tragedy and triumph: Raghu Rai's enduring capture of Bangladesh Liberation War

Raghu Rai's death and his landmark photographs of the Bangladesh Liberation War flooded me with my personal memories. In the autumn of 1971, I was a teenager when I accompanied my parents during our annual holiday to visit Kolkata.

One morning during our stay in a south Kolkata suburb, my friends from a local football club asked me to join a door-to-door campaign to collect clothes and food for a group of people uprooted from their home and hearth in Bangladesh by the untold atrocities of the Pakistani army.

By afternoon, we managed to mobilise two huge sacks containing clothes for men, women and children and dry food like puffed rice, jiggery and milk powder. When we reached the refugee camps near Sealdah in central Kolkata where several families had taken shelter, the sun was beginning to slide and there was a slight nip in the air. In messy makeshift camps, grown-up men and women were busy with their daily chores and some of them glued to transistors. 

The children of my age, however, played football on a nearby road. As we distributed the relief materials, I saw for the first time what the life of refugees forced out of their homes in a faraway land was like. 

I had heard innumerable stories of refugees and their life from my parents who had crossed to this part of Bengal before the Partition and here I got an opportunity to realize what they had undergone.

Endless procession of people from all walks of life, shouting slogans like "Bangladesher aarek naam Vietnam Vietnam" and "Joy Bangla," kept visiting the shelters of refugees from Bangladesh everyday enquiring about their problems, sharing their agony and sense of loss of home and at the same time their dream of an independent homeland. 

What happened in Sealdah was a microcosm of the reality in the rest of India—an outpour of  solidarity with the people of Bangladesh at the time of their existential crisis. 

Unending rows of distraught and emaciated men, women and children, barely clothed trudging towards India clinging on to brass and aluminium utensils, pieces of burnt crops reminiscent of imperial Britain's scorched-earth policy in India during the Second World War – these are glimpses from iconic Indian photographer Rahu Rai's most enduring captures through the lens of the Bangladesh Liberation War.

Rai covered the Liberation War in two separate phases – first in August 1971 and again four months later in December 1971 to record that unforgettable moment when Pakistan's army chief AAK Niazi surrendered in what is now Dhaka.

The photographs Rai took during the war are contained in a book published by Niyogi Books.

The photographs would have been lost for posterity had Rai not remembered and found the negatives stored for safekeeping after. In 2011, Rai called his friend Shahidul Alam, the doyen of Bangladeshi photography, to say that the negatives had been found.

Rai's photographs are now published in the book titled "Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom," a 116-page document with 91 photographs, with the introduction by Alam and short texts by Rai describing his two assignments during the war.

Rai's journey to Bangladesh in August documents the stories of refugees and then again in December, with the Indian army to chronicle the Pakistani army's surrender to Indian forces and Bangladesh's muktijoddha, says veteran writer-journalist Salil Tripathi in "The Caravan" in 2013.

But it was in early December in 1971 that Rai's travel to Bangladesh had its share of dangerous and dramatic moments. As he went along with the first column of Indian troops entering  from Khulna border, Pakistani forces attacked with artillery fire. Rai shot photographs of wounded soldiers being taken away. After the firing subsided, Rai went to a tea-shop to take a break even though the Indian army major told him to be watchful. Just as Rai ordered tea and biscuits, a bullet whizzed past him.

"The major shouted for me to lie down," Rai wrote. "I did, and another bullet went past me. I crawled back to the shop and was told by the shopkeeper that the Pakistani army was on the other side of the railtrack, just half a kilometer away," recounted Rai in the book.

Recalling his first visit in August, Rai says the peak monsoon rain had blurred borders and the refugees with their meager belongings poured in…..There was a kind of a silence – nobody was talking. There was nothing the others did not know."

Rai's photos show scorched land, destroyed homes, women defiled, ceaseless violence and humiliation of farmers, fishermen and boatmen.

Rai's coverage particularly brings out how women were hit by the war: a woman with her head covered, another holding an earthen pot in one hand and breastfeeding infant with the other with a 'gamchha' covering her torso, a woman carried in palki and a naked child lying on the ground between the large pipes where families have taken shelter.

According to Salil Tripathi, "in many ways, Rai brings to life Allen Ginsberg's haunting poem "September on Jessore Road":

Millions of babies watching the skies

Bellies swollen, with big round eyes

On Jessore Road – long bamboo huts

No place to shit but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain

Millions of mothers in pain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of sisters nowhere to go

At the war's culmination in Dhaka, Rai clicks the then Indian Gen Jagjit Singh Arora strides purposefully towards the desk, alongside Niazi looking on the ground as they enter a tent before the formal surrender.