Sunil Janah

Sunil Janah was born on 17 April 1918 in Dibrugarh, Assam[6] but grew up in Kolkata. He attended St. Xavier's College, Kolkata at the University of Calcutta. There, he joined politically leftist students. Communist politician Puran Chand Joshi urged Janah to abandon his English studies and pursue a career in photography. Janah traveled to Bengal with Chittaprosad Bhattacharya to photograph the damages caused by the 1943 famine. He moved with Bhattacharya to Bombay and joined the Progressive Writers Association and Indian People’s Theatre Association. He was a co-founder of Calcutta Film Society.[2] He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 2012.[7]

He died on 21 June 2012 at his home in Berkeley, California due to natural causes. He is survived by his son, Arjun, who lives in Brooklyn, New York.[2]

In ‘People’s War’ and after that ‘People’s Age’ Janah used to have one page for a photo feature for which he photographed the lives of ordinary people, their struggles, the beauty of the working class at work, rowing boats, catching fish, in coal mines, from men and women working in homes and fields to bow and arrow carrying tribals, farmers and workers heading to protest, revolutionaries of Telangana and via these photographs he established the Communist Party’s ideology and commitment amongst the people.[8] Portraits of well-known people like Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Sheikh Abdullah, Faiz, J. Krishnamurthi, etc. taken by Sunil Janah is very famous. Photographer and curator Ram Rahman says, "Janah’s work is the defining epic document of the last decade of the freedom struggle and the first decade of free India — a chronicler of the ‘Nehruvian’ years".[9]

Shadowing a Philanthropologist, By Ramachandra Guha,[10] University of Chicago Press, 398 pp, ISBN 978-0-226-31047-3

Virtual Exhibition (SF 2000) on Web[11]

Context to Exhibits (NY 1998) on web[12]