Window Seat | Weekly column in English | 18.12.22

 

Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee | 18.9.22

Margaret Bourke-White

I am writing a book on literature, cinema, reports, photographs, cartoons and other art forms on partition of India. I found that most of the photographs that we see on partition were taken by Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971). For the past seven and half decades, her images have were found on the cover of numerous books, newspaper articles, magazine features, documentaries related to Partition.

Born in New York City and raised in rural New Jersey, Bourke-White ‘took to documentary photography in order to disseminate the idea of inconvenient truth’. In 1936, Henry R Luce, bought Life magazine and relaunched it, with Bourke-White becoming one of the first photojournalist to be offered a berth there.

She arrived in India by early 1946 on assignment to cover the transition of power, which by then was evident to happen. She travelled around India documenting low life and high people. She took some of the photographs of Gandhi, which later became iconic (one with the spinning wheel comes immediately to the mind). She also took photographs of Jinnah.

Bourke-White documented the aftermath of the so-called Direct-Action Day in August 1946, which was announced by Jinnah following the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan. Her photographs of the riots in Calcutta then are sometimes confused with the images she took following the Partition, a year later. The article ‘The Vultures of Calcutta’ featured in the 9 September 1946 issue of Life, showing vultures waiting to prey on the bodies of dead victims was later, intermittently and inaccurately, used for depicting the carnage in August 1947.

Photo: Bourke-White

She captured the Partition-related violence and migration, as it ushered in the new dawn of independence. Her photographic essay, The Great Migration: Five Million Indians Flee for Their Lives, was published in Life magazine on 3 November 1947. She wrote:  “All roads between India and Pakistan were choked with streams of refugees. In scenes reminiscent of the Biblical times, hordes of displaced people trudged across the newly created borders to an uncertain future”

In 2010, Pramod Kapoor published Witness to life and freedom: Margaret Bourke-White in India & Pakistan with a reprint of over 100 of her photographs. Kapoor wrote about them thus: “They offer a kind of stately, classical view of misery, of humanity at its most wretched, yet somehow noble, somehow beautiful”.

Family of Rani Laxmibai

The image of the Rani Laxmibai riding a horse with her 8-year-old son Damador Rao tied on her back with a cloth battling the British soldiers is sketched in everyone’s mind, thanks to the folktales, paintings and later plays and films. I often wandered what happened to her son, the minor Prince of Jhansi? Did he survive after Laxmibai’s martyrdom?

Recently I came across couple of articles, which said he did- with great difficulty as many refused to help him and the persons loyal to Rani Laxmibai, who were trying to protect him. He was forced to live in almost anonymity in Indore. After Damador Rao died his son Laxman Rao Jhansiwale, was given a pension of Rs 200 per month by the Britishers till India gained independence. Laxman Rao and his next four generations continued to live an anonymous life in Indore. Later, they shifted to Nagpur, where the sixth generation descendant works in a software company and prefers to lead an anonymous life.

Technology and rising disinformation

Disinformation and fake news have become a menace globally. Governments across the world are struggling to enact laws to contain the menace. However, the problem is that technology advances far more quickly than government policies.

Thanks to bigger data, better algorithms, and custom hardware, in the coming years, individuals around the world will increasingly have access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence. From health care to transportation, the democratization of AI holds enormous promise. Yet as with any dual-use technology, the proliferation of AI also poses significant risks. Among other concerns, it promises to democratize the creation of fake print, audio, and video stories. Fueled by advances in artificial intelligence and decentralized computing, the next generation of disinformation promises to be even more sophisticated and difficult to detect.

The lawmakers, therefore, as Chris Meserole and Alina Polyakova of Brookings Institution write: lawmakers should focus on four emerging threats in particular: the democratization of artificial intelligence, the evolution of social networks, the rise of decentralized applications, and the “back end” of disinformation.

Tailpiece: Why just two?

A man walks into a bar and orders 3 beers.

The bartender asks him why he gets three beers the man told the bartender well one is for me and the other two, for my brothers who live in Chandigarh.

The man does this for about a week and one day the man walks in and orders two beers instead of three. The bartender asks him why just two?

The man said, well my wife told me I had to quit drinking but she didn’t say anything about my brothers to stop.

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Journalist turned media academician Mrinal Chatterjee lives in Dhenkanal, Odisha. He also writes fiction and plays. He can be contacted at mrinalchatterjeeiimc@gmail.com