First encounters: Raghu Rai did not recognise Husain, was pulled up by Mother Teresa

New Delhi: M F Husain and Mother Teresa were among Raghu Rai’s most celebrated muses. Yet his first encounters with them were strikingly different: he failed to recognise the artist and was sharply rebuked by the nun mid-shoot.

Rai, one of India’s best-known photographers who chronicled an India on the move and received a Padma Shri when he was in his 20s, died on Sunday. He was 83.

The meetings with Husain and Mother Teresa happened while Rai was still finding his footing as a young photographer, moving between newsroom assignments and field postings, according to the biography, "Raghu Rai: Waiting for the Divine" by Rachna Singh.

Recounting his first meeting with Husain in the 1960s at The Statesman, where he had joined as chief photographer, Rai is quoted as saying, “A bearded man came in and said, ‘I am Husain and I am an artist.’ I did not know about art and artists then.” Husain had come to praise his work, telling him, “We see your photographs every Sunday… No one captures India like you do.” It was only after Husain left that the significance of the encounter became clear.

“My editor stopped me and said, ‘That was Husain baba… you don’t know him? He is the greatest artist.’ I said, ‘No',” Rai recalled.

The next time they met, Husain gifted him a painting “He brought me ‘Birth of Ganesha’… the original,” Rai said.

A later assignment took him to Kolkata - and Mother Teresa.

Sent to photograph her by a magazine editor around 1970, Rai walked into the modest premises of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata where “there was an old wooden table and a few rickety chairs… nothing more.” As an instinctive image-maker, he quickly began scanning the space for a frame. Through a half-curtain, he noticed a group of nuns reading, the light and movement struck him as almost ethereal, according to the book.

Driven by the urge to capture the moment, he dropped to the floor to find the right angle -- an action that startled even the ever calm Mother Teresa.

“She thundered, ‘What the hell on earth are you doing there'?” Rai recalled.

Emerging from behind his camera, he explained, “Mother, those sisters through the curtains are looking like angels.” The tension dissolved instantly.

“She understood and said, ‘All right,’” he said. “That was Mother -- tough, but if you made sense, she was all yours.” Rai went on to produce four books on Mother Teresa.

These encounters came as Rai’s work was beginning to draw attention, soon moving far beyond India. His photographs of Bangladeshi refugees during the early 1970s “created quite a ripple", bringing him into conversation with officials in the Indira Gandhi government, the book records.

“They wanted me to take an exhibition only on refugees abroad… I said no,” he said, wary of propaganda.

Instead, he proposed a balanced show: 50 photographs of his creative work and 25 of refugees. The proposal was accepted, setting off an unexpected international tour.

What followed went far beyond expectations.

He found himself being feted by the press in Paris and Germany. Famous German newspaper Die Welt carried glowing reviews, and the response was repeated in Tokyo, Washington, Hong Kong and other capitals.

“When the exhibition went to New York,” he added, “our foreign secretary was there to meet me but surprisingly, the American TV channels were more interested in me rather than the Indian ambassador to US or other senior bureaucrats." "Their question when they arrived at the gallery always was, ‘Where is the photographer?’ I was given great coverage," reads the book published by Hawakal Publishers.

On his return to India, recognition came swiftly. Summoned by then home secretary Govind Narayan, he initially assumed it was a routine debriefing.

Instead, he was told he would be honoured with the Padma Shri.

“I blurted out, ‘Are you sure?' That’s how I received my Padma Shri,” he added. An early honour that, much like his first meetings with greatness, arrived before he had quite recognised his own.