From Longing, 2008, 2005, Digital
From Longing, 2008, 2005, Digital © ESTATE OF PRABUDDHA DASGUPTA

On September 19, the National Gallery of Modern Art hosted the opening of Prabuddha Dasgupta: A Journey, a retrospective on the work of a man regarded as one of India’s finest photographers in the past two decades. A giant crowd of artists and aficionados filled the auditorium well beyond its capacity, then poured into the exhibition space, still swelling in numbers, in a state of excitement that hadn’t been witnessed at the NGMA since Anish Kapoor’s solo exhibition five years earlier.

Suddenly, the cacophony was punctured by the screech of hundreds of sasta Chinese whistles. A group of students from the Delhi College of Art, accompanied by the artist Inder Salim, sought the attention of the crowd to voice concerns about the present cultural administration in the country.

For much of the audience, it may have seemed an unlikely place to make a statement about freedom of expression. Prabuddha Dasgupta rose into the limelight as a photographer on commercial assignments; after his death in 2012, William Dalrymple credited him with having “invented glamour” for the India of the 1990s. Yet challenges to the diffusion of art and the erotic image were woven through his life and his work.

These photographs, as Geoff Dyer noted in the text accompanying the series, “attach themselves deeply to the spectator, while simultaneously floating free of conscious life and memories, refusing to become part of the documentary or circumstantial record”. We feel the proximity of the camera with the subject in The Longing, to the point that we feel the camera – the eye of the photographer – move in the space around the subject; we feel the movement of the artist in the blurriness of the photographs, and thus his presence amongst us.

Prabudha died in 2012, but the retrospective of his work at the NGMA testifies to a quiet victory against ideas about uniform, conservative Indian culture. The NGMA should be applauded for it, and for seeing through the twin blinds of commerce and conservatism, to the coded message of encouragement that Prodosh gave to his sons: Whatever you do, never forget that an artist is exactly what you are.