In black and white

It took the late Mitter Bedi's pioneering efforts to demonstrate that industrial photography had scope for creativity. Unwittingly, perhaps, he has also bequeathed us with a moving account of the bold initial success, and eventual tragic failure, of the Nehruvian idea of modernity, says RANJIT HOSKOTE.

OF all photographers, it is the industrial photographer who has the smallest degree of freedom in the matter of subject and treatment, for his primary frame of activity is advertising. Industrial photography is one of the principal genres of capitalist visual culture: originating in the desire of the great private corporations of the First World for public attention, it glossily emphasised the scale of a corporation's operations, the efficiency of its processes and the finesse of its products.

The propaganda value of this genre was not lost on the State in early post-colonial India, and industrial photography received substantial patronage both from public sector corporations and from private enterprises functioning under the protection of the mixed economy. It soon became the visual expression of an economic blueprint that embraced the apparatus of the Five-Year Plans, extolled the Stalinist virtue of developing heavy industry and initiated the fertiliser-driven Green Revolution. In the first four decades after Independence, therefore, industrial photography served mainly as a vehicle for the mythology of a nascent nation-state committed to rapid industrialisation, with the engineer as its folk-hero; today, by contrast, it conveys the mythology of a newly emerging transnational market, whose folk- hero is the consumer. Then as now, though, the output of most Indian industrial photographers was confined to the annual reports, calendars and other paraphernalia of corporate publicity.

It was the late Mitter Bedi's pioneering achievement to have demonstrated that industrial photography, despite its manifest limitations, could offer considerable scope to the creative intelligence in post-colonial India. As a leading practitioner of his art, Bedi kept faith with the advertiser's promotional mandate. But he did far more than that: he drew a felicitous poetry from architectural structures and engineering procedures, casting a magical aura around refineries and assembly lines, railway tracks and power looms, gleaming cooling towers and electricity grids that are the set-pieces of the genre. Indeed, Bedi's photographs of industrial sites and installations are counted among the most memorable images of the grand Nehruvian project of national development.

A small-scale reprise of Bedi's oeuvre was rendered possible recently, when an exhibition of his black-and-white photographs, dating mainly from the 1960s and the 1970s, was mounted at the Piramal Centre for Photography as an Art Form, Mumbai. Set against the gaudier delights of the Age of Liberalisation, these images capture the heroic mood of the period between Independence and the Emergency. They convey the Republic's confident belief that it could fulfil the goal of national self-reliance, that it could overcome the famines, droughts and floods that had afflicted a subcontinent whose resources had been ruthlessly depleted by the colonial administration to sustain the Allied armies during the Second World War.

And Bedi occupied a historically advantageous position from which to record this momentous process of transition. Born in Lahore in 1926, he moved to Bombay in 1940, working in a printing press and the publicity department of a commercial firm before joining the motion-picture industry in 1947, the year of Partition and Independence.

The course of Bedi's legendary career as a photographer was an archetypal Bombay success story: beginning with modest commissions to photograph weddings and birthday parties in the early 1950s, he graduated swiftly to prestigious assignments from corporations like Air-India International, Lever's, and the Standard Vacuum Oil Company (later nationalised as Hindustan Petroleum). He found a sense of focussed purpose in 1959, when he met the noted American industrial photographer Arthur Darzien, while working on an assignment for Standard Vacuum.

By the time of his death in 1985, Bedi had photographed more than 2,000 installations spanning a wide range of industries, from steel, fertilisers and textiles to paper, sugar and pharmaceuticals. His interests extended to the service and hospitality sector, and he documented many establishments of the Indian Hotels Group, Welcomgroup and the Indian Tourism Development Corporation. More fortunate than most pioneers, Bedi enjoyed renown during his lifetime, receiving two Kodak International Awards, nine Advertising Club Awards, six Commercial Artists Guild (CAG) Awards, and the CAG's "Photographer of the Year" title for 1984. No reclusive genius, he popularised photography by writing extensively on the medium and encouraging many young enthusiasts who went on to become accomplished visual-arts professionals themselves. He also established an academy for the discipline, and his South Bombay studio (now run by his family) continues to be a platform for superior black-and-white photography.

Enshrining the primacy of the machine as it did, Bedi's art can be viewed as a series of visual hymns to Progress: to the theme of technology as hope of redemption, as guarantee of a common future in which all Indians would be emancipated from hunger and poverty. During the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed that all the constituents of the nation-state, all its classes, ethnic groups and regions, had such a common future. The authoritarianism of the Emergency (1975-1977) was to shake popular faith in this ideal, and the schismatic, sectarian politics of the 1980s and 1990s would shatter it conclusively. But Bedi did not live to experience the full consequences of this social and political upheaval; his photographs are animated by the confident optimism of the Nehruvian project.

Bedi's lens is not, therefore, a neutral recording mechanism; it is the instrument of an ideology. A sophisticated Machine-Age aesthetic frames these views, accentuating the sharp linearity of ladders and pipelines, unadorned brick and metal surfaces, the sparkling transparency of glass alembics and the rotary rhythms of wheels. Whether it is with the monumental smokestacks of the Dhuwaran Power Station (1964), or the gleaming coolant towers of a NOCIL plant (1967), we see Bedi tapping mechanical forms for their inherent symmetry, organising them into an ensemble radiating efficiency, power and manufacturing capacity.

Bedi attains a striking, near-abstract beauty when he leaves the constraints of the commission behind and acts like an intrepid surgeon of images. A fine example of this mood is the photograph of the Eagle Flask assembly line (1967), with its array of thermos-flask innards. As Bedi dwells on these objects, surrendering his controlling impulse, their glassy metal acquires strange dimensions, at once reminiscent of chandeliers and suggestive of stripped internal organs pulsing in unintended light.

Re-visiting Bedi's images with the benefit of hindsight can be a painful experience, simply because our ideological distance from the project they signify has grown so great. Elegant tropes of the rhetoric of Progress, Bedi's showpieces from the mixed economy do not show more than a vestige of the social or natural context of Indian industry. What these photographs do not show, and cannot be expected to have shown, has been revealed by time and popular struggles: the social and ecological costs of development, paid for with the catastrophe of drying lakes and poisoned rivers, displaced communities and endemic starvation.

A consciousness tempered by environmental sensitivity would scarcely respond with enthusiasm now to the smoke belched forth by the smokestacks, the rivers of effluent hidden behind the imposing facades of the factories. And the conspicuous diminution of the human presence against structures and processes that are celebrated as triumphs of human ingenuity only heightens the feeling that technology has somehow been disembodied and isolated from ordinary life. The vistas of shop-floors in this exhibition (the Gujarat Electricity Board, 1964; Greaves Cotton, 1977) resemble the mysterious architectural fantasies of Piranesi or the trick-perspectives of Escher, complete with strutworks of ladders and girders, floating staircases and precarious catwalks.

The only figures visible are the occasional technician gauging his handiwork with a pair of calipers, or a supervisor in clinical white keeping solitary vigil over a chemical process. Or then, we see a pair of stewards pushing food trolleys along the bridge-corridors of the old wing of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, or an isolated worker crouched among cement sacks, or a tableaux of men loading sacks of fertiliser. Bedi tended to dramatise technology as the master discourse of specialists rather than as a means of securing agency for the people at large: stylising the workaday motions of industrial personnel into priestly gestures, he invests their routines with the gravity and grace of ritual.

The absence or stylisation of the human is symptomatic of the malaise that afflicted the programme of economic transformation that Bedi memorialised. The modern technology offered as the definitive remedy for India's problems merely served an entrenched feudal-capitalist power structure; and the Utopia enshrined in Nehru's socialist policies, and in Bedi's photographs, was betrayed by the persistence and exacerbation of social inequity. Mitter Bedi's lasting achievement was to imbue industrial photography with a measure of the poetic; unwittingly, perhaps, he has also bequeathed us a deeply moving account of the bold initial success, and eventual tragic failure, of the Nehruvian project of national modernity.

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