A street photographer who celebrated Indian women

Pranlal K Patel's photographs of women at work will be exhibited in New York

A little over five weeks before his first exhibition in the United States, one of India’s first street photographers sat crossed-legged on a bed in his home in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and pulled out one of his favorite photographs.

It was an image taken in 1937 of women washing clothes on the banks of the Sabarmati river that cuts through Ahmedabad. For Pranlal Patel, 104, perhaps Gujarat’s most celebrated photographer, the picture was remarkable because it contained nearly every shape imaginable.

“You can see squares, rectangles, and circles. You can also see people, animals, water, sky and earth,” Patel said, his voice rising with excitement.

For Lisa Trivedi, a professor of history at Hamilton College in New York who curated the upcoming exhibition of Patel’s photographs for the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, the photos are remarkable for another reason.

“At the time, most photography was indoor studio work, but Pranlal showed women in the public space, contributing to society and engaged in every day activities,” Ms Trivedi said. “It was a revolutionary new way to show women, something rarely seen before in pre-World War II photography from India.”

Trivedi, 45, discovered Patel’s work while on a Fulbright Scholarship to Gujarat in 1996. During her frequent visits to Ahmedabad, she would often spend hours at Patel’s home, going through the estimated 50,000 photos that Patel took in his eight decades as a photographer.

They discussed the idea of creating an exhibition of his work, and Trivedi selected 30 of his photographs, all of them taken in 1937 when Patel was commissioned by a Gujarat nonprofit called Jyoti Sangh to photograph women in Ahmedabad.

The exhibition, “Refocusing the Lens: Pranlal K Patel’s Photographs of Women at Work in Ahmedabad,” opens at the Wellin Museum on Saturday and runs until April 15. During an interview on Dec. 26, he kept an envelope close to his side, which contained his Indian passport and his plane ticket to the United States to attend the opening. “They did not even make me leave my home to get a visa,” Patel said, beaming.

Unfortunately, the photographer would not see his American exhibition. On Jan. 18, Patel died in his sleep.

A few days before he died, Patel, who had fallen ill by then, wrote a three-page letter to his family. “He gave us strict instructions that we are not allowed to wear the traditional color of white at his cremation,” said his grandson Gautam, 46. “We are supposed to wear bright colors and observe his death like it was his birthday. All his life my grandfather loved black-and-white images, but in death he only wanted color.”

Patel was born in 1910 in a village called Keshiya in the Jamnagar district of Gujarat. After his mother died when he was 5, he moved with his maternal grandmother to Ahmedabad, where he lived until his death. Patel worked odd jobs as a young boy, including selling copies of Navajivan (New Life), the newspaper started by Mahatma Gandhi, on the street .

He completed schooling up to the age of 12 and after working various jobs, he began teaching elementary school in the 1930s. He earned just 15.5 rupees a month and supplemented his income by selling farsan, or Gujarati snacks, outside a cinema hall in Ahmedabad, which he often sneaked into to watch “Raja Harishchandra,” one of the first feature-length films in India.

Rare experimentation

Patel initially wanted to become a musician. But, he said with a wide smile, “I have no musical talent. So I picked up this new thing they were calling a camera.”

According to him, there were only eight other photographers working in Ahmedabad at the time, most of them with studios. Because he could not afford a studio, Patel did something rarely done at the time — experiment with outdoor and street photography.

His best-known images are of people outside their homes reacting to things: a group of women staring with bewilderment at a phonograph, a young girl covering her ears to mute the noise of a passing train. In another image, we see a group of women selling babul sticks used as toothbrushes in the market, standing next to and interacting with men.

This is one of the reasons, Ms. Trivedi said, that Jyoti Sangh did not actively promote his photos at the time. “He did not show women as victims needing to be helped,”  Trivedi said.

When asked about these photos, and about the upcoming exhibition of his street photographs of women from 1937, he seemed confused. “I took these photos because they asked me and because they paid me,” he said.

Indeed, when asked about his picture of a woman ironing clothes, he said the only reason he took the picture was because he was attracted by the shape of the iron, an item he had seldom seen before.

In 1937, Patel earned 710 rupees mostly from photos he sold to newspapers, far greater than his 15.5 rupee monthly teaching salary. With his late wife Damyanti’s help — who he called his “right hand” — he doubled that amount the next year and was able to quit his teaching job.

In 1940, he opened up his own studio and named it Patel Studios, which is still run by his son, Anand, who is 70. But while Mr Patel could survive on a photographer’s salary, it is something his son and grandson have struggled to do.

Patel is also famous for photographing some of India’s pioneering leaders, like India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who  Patel described as “temperamental.” B R Ambedkar, the man who fought against the caste system, was described by Patel as “a very kind man.”

Patel’s favorite person to photograph, however, was India’s first home minister, the Gujarat-born Sardar Patel. “He was the only one who learned my name,” Patel said. While he never photographed Mahatma Gandhi, Patel claimed he knew the secret to capturing the leader on film. “You have to be invisible around Gandhi to photograph him,” he said.

But it is photographs of women that are likely to be his lasting legacy. “He got away with taking pictures of ordinary women at a time when many women refused to be photographed,” said Claire Robison, a South Asian religious studies scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara who is based in Mumbai.

“He made photography accessible,” said Ms Robison, 31. “He broke the dichotomy of either showing stylized studio women or women as powerless colonial subjects. He developed a whole new space — the image of women as they are.”