Women changing India: Iconic divas on Magnum camera

NEW DELHI - At the heart of change in contemporary India are women, the country’s silent force that is scripting success in diverse spheres, from economy and politics to showbiz, arts and education. Ninety such stories captured by six acclaimed Magnum photographers are now on display here.

The exhibition, “Women Changing India”, opened here this weekend.

“The truth is that India is the only country where we worship women as goddess - it has been a tradition for centuries. She not only runs the home but takes care to ensure that the family stays together. Look at Ela Bhatt and Aruna Roy; they are icons in their own right and great mothers like Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi,” ace lensman Raghu Rai, a Magnum photographer, told IANS.

The show is a collaboration between the BNP Paribas bank and the publishing house Zubaan to mark the 150th year of the bank in India.

The bank is involved in several grassroots development and micro-credit projects managed by women’s self-help groups in India.

A book, “Women Changing India”, celebrating the achievement of Indian women, was unveiled by Zubaan and Magnum Photos, the international agency of photographers founded by photo legend Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert in 1947.

The photographs by Raghu Rai, Olivia Arthur, Martine Franck, Alessandra Sanguenetti, Alex Web and Patrick Zachmann capture women as tools of change in villages, new professions, arts, cinema and in the corridors of power.

The photographs are powerful reality shots that portray women in their hot seats and at home, bring to light the complex balance of power that Indian women are known to wield since the Vedic age.

The exhibition, like the book, has been divided into five segments.

Photographer Raghu Rai turns his lens on iconic figures like Ela Bhatt, the founder of the rural micro-credit and crafts movement SEWA, Preetha Pandey, managing director of Apollo Hospital, Chanda Kochhar, the CEO of ICICI Bank, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, the director of Biocon Ltd, writer Mahasweta Devi and artist Anjolie Ela Menon in a series of portraits, “The Heart of India: Iconic Women”.

The portraits feature accompanying texts by Tarun Tejpal and character profiles by Peter Griffin.

As a reality photographer, Rai has documented the lives and works of several powerful women. “But the two that I enjoyed clicking were Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

“I think Indira Gandhi was the most powerful, vibrant, unpredictable and dangerously beautiful women I have ever seen,” said Rai, who has documented the lives of Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa in pictorial volumes.

For women’s rights activist Urvashi Butalia, the publisher of Zubaan, “women represent different kinds of things”.

“If you look at the change happening in India, you will find women at different levels. There are organisations like SEWA, which is driving social and financial empowerment at the grassroots, the Kutch Mahila Sangathan that transformed the rural economy of the Kutch region in Gujarat, the women’s taxi service in Mumbai that has brought women on par with men in the male-dominated public transport network,” Butalia told IANS.

“Look at the Infosys campus… the way women are being involved at every level. My book wanted to document what was happening - whether women were managing to improve things for themselves,” said Butalia, who has been spearheading women’s publishing movement.

Women’s power has wide connotations.

“Our idea of conventional achievers are those women who grab the limelight with their work. But there are thousand of silent women who are changing the system at the grassroots and in everyday life. They should be brought to the mainstream,” curator Alka Pande told IANS.