Kulwant Roy, a well-known photo-journalist of the 1940s, 50s and the mid60s, is today forgotten; this, despite having left behind 10,000 negatives, mostly in the medium format, that is 2 1/4 inch x 2 1/4 inch size and small or 35 mm size. Pictures from the 1930s to the middle 40s were taken with a bulky Speed Graphic Sheet-film camera with 4 x 5 inch negative size.

It is thanks to the effort of his adopted nephew, the well-known photographer, Aditya Aarya, has the memory of his work been revived. Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGCNA) hosted a three-week long exhibition in its new building on Man Singh Road . It concluded on October 21, 2008.

The exhibition, titled History in the Making, The Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy, contained 96 prints in black and white, baring a few, straight news photographs. His bread and butter pictures of the leaders of the freedom struggle like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, amongst others have stood the test of the time not only as visual documents of historical value but as photographs. Roy understood composition and light very well. All the pictures in the exhibition were gracefully composed; even the most “mundane” ones in content.

“Gandhi collecting money for the Harijan Fund” in 1940, is a case in point. A seated Gandhi, frame right, is looking at a small bunch of paper currency on a board. On frame left is a youngish woman in a broad checked saree looking almost adoringly at the bespectacled, bare bodied seventy year old leader, and in the middle of the picture is a stoutish man in three-quarter profile, in dhoti-kurta , who has placed his left hand on the rupee-notes on the board. On the left in the background, is a figure of the industrialist Jamnadas Bajaj in white cap and spectacles. Between Bajaj, and the woman in the foreground, already mentioned, is another woman in profile, seated on the ground wearing a saree with large polka dots on it. It is a mysterious, poetic picture; knowing the names of the people in it only enhances its news value; now historical value.

There is a small, vertical picture of Kulwant Roy, in sunlight, overcoat drapped on his arm, striking a pose in an unnamed street in New York city in the early 1960s. He looks like, believe it or not, at once a dandy and a brisk, practical man. Perhaps this picture tells us more about him apart from his elegant, sometimes poignant photographs.

Wanderlust took him to over twenty countries and it was on his travels that he discovered new worlds. To other cultures he took photographic samples of his own. And his taking and selling of photographs – he was published in many leading magazines abroad – paid for his travels. It also proved, sadly to be his undoing. The negatives he posted back to India from various countries never reached. He spent years going from post-office to post-office looking for his lost work, and even, perhaps unhinged in his last year, looked for envelopes containing his negatives in dustbins.

His life, as the photographs in this heart-warming exhibition proved, was no chimera. He was an inextricable part of the freedom struggle and also a part of the nation-building vision as any creative Indian of his period.

There is a picture full of wry humour of a smartly suited Muhammed Ali Jinnah, cigarette in hand, frame left, with a doorway in the background in his residence in Delhi, gesturing in impatience, making a point, and, Gandhiji, in profile, somewhat lower, in frame right, clad in a white dhoti , stick in hand, also gesturing as if, to refute Jinnah's point. The diagonal pull of composition from top frame left to lower frame right gives this picture its energy, and, the expression on the face of Mr Jinnah its wit.

There are photos, displayed side by side, from the 1940s, the first is distinctly uncomfortable looking Jawaharlal Nehru, standing in the doorway of a second-class compartment, in strong sunlight with his head bowed. A woman with a strong profile is on the right with an umbrella over her head, and, a young man on her right looking up quizzically at Nehru. The second is of Gandhiji, head down, in customary white dhoti , alighting from a third class compartment. A man is looking out from a window on the left side of the compartment. Outside two Congress workers, one in a cap with his figure back to camera, bowing low in reverence. Both the images, despite being tinged with fleeting ambiguity, are also lightly ironic.

There is an expressive picture from the Shimla Conference in 1945. On the left is the tall, strong, shawl draped over his head, Pathan Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Nehru, in white cap and darkish Achkan , their shadows on the ground – interlocked, and Sardar patel, on the right in a hand-drawn rickshaw being pulled by coolies. Again the diagonal left to right almost lateral, though not quite, pull of the composition, in retrospect, spells something inexorable like the making or breaking of destinies. Of course, this is a highly subjective personal opinion.

Another one that is more than a front page news picture, is that of Gandhi seated on stage flanked by Sardar Patel on his left and Jawaharlal Nehru on his right. There is a poster behind them of Gandhi centre-frame and partly visible feet in chains on his right with lettering spelling Golami or slavery and another pair coming down diagonally from the left, similarly chained. A Congress worker in background left looks on. Gandhi and his two Congress confreres look like conspirators hatching a plot. The year is 1946 and a proposal for forming an interim government has just been mooted.

A composition of an aged Maharaja of Kapurthala, every inch the haughty aristocrat, Uprajpramukh of the Phulkian Union, seated on a sofa next to Sardar Patel on his left, who is thinking eyes shut, has an air of inevitability about it. Even if the viewer does not know the context of the photograph, it would be amply clear that the Maharaja was about to be swept aside by the tough, silent man listening to him. It was taken in Motibagh, Patiala on July 15, 1948! The princely states were being strong-armed by Patel to join the Union of India and enter a possibly modern age, eleven months after independence from 190 years of British rule.

Nehru and lady Pamela Mountbatten, vicereign of India , on the tarmac of Safdarjung airport in June 1948 leaving India is a sad, stylish picture. The two figures, also dear friends, appear to be at a loss for words. She, eyes downcast, with a half-smile on her lips and he, on her right, looking at something or someone off-camera, with a gentle smile on his face. The picture says it all. The names of the players in this silent drama is a bonus, and necessary only for the historical records.

The Rolliflex, a precise optical instrument was Kulwant Roy's mainstay initially. Then in the mid 1950s and later, the 35 mm Leica, the finest rangefinder camera available. Its portability and exceptionally sharp lenses freed photographers the world over to capture candid pictures, almost at will. Moreover, the tiny 24 x 36 mm negative was well compensated for with the availability of fine grain developers, which guaranteed sharp pictures even when blown up to 16 inches x 20 inches size.

His photographic record of the building of the Bhakra Nangal Dam in Punjab , in the 1950s, is more than just historical. Images of this undertaking are powerful and emotive. A strong design sense and an awareness of the play of light inform many of them. Of particular interest is an image of two silhouetted figures fairly close on the right, against the receding lampposts on the left, also in deep shadow. On the right, is part of the dam's structure in sunlight and a cyclist in deep shadow moving forward and out. Another fine picture is “ Payday”. In it dam workers mill around a van to collect their pay. It is a nostalgic image, that, strangely, has kinship with some captured by the American documentary photographer of the 1930s, who, as much as the Frenchman Henri Cartier Bresson, helped define the aesthetics of candid photography.