Sunil Janah was born in Dibrugarh, British India (now India) in 1918. He became a well-known and well-regarded photographer in Calcutta in the 1940s and 1950s, documenting India's pre- and post-independence. Janah lived in London between 1980 and 2003, during which time his works were shown extensively in UK exhibitions.
Photojournalist Sunil Janah was born in Dibrugarh, Assam, British India (now India) on 17 April 1918. Janah grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he attended St. Xavier’s and Presidency colleges at the University of Calcutta. Photography was at first a hobby, but the images he took of the Bengal famine of 1943 catapulted him to fame, and he was appointed official Indian Communist Party photographer and correspondent for the Party's newspaper, People’s War. In this role he photographed some of the most momentous and brutal events of the struggle for Indian independence, while for Life magazine he worked with the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White to document the 1947 partition of the country, which had triggered riots, violence and slaughter, and the migration of millions of refugees across the newly defined borders between India and Pakistan. Capturing historic moments in the lives of leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, as well as the mass movements of the period, Janah ‘became one of the most sought-after photographers of the post-independence years’ (Terracciano, 2012). During the 1950s he worked for the U.N. in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Switzerland and France, and until the 1960s was a senior lecturer and head of the Department of Photography in the School of Printing Technology in Calcutta, where he ran his own photographic studio (Hiro, 1986). Later, due to the onset of glaucoma, Janah was less prolific in his photography and in 1980, with his wife Shoba, a doctor, moved to England, settling in south London where they lived for over two decades.
While Janah did not practice photography in London as actively as before, he continued writing, darkroom-printing and exhibiting his works in various important solo and group exhibitions in the UK. In 1982 he was featured in Festival of India: Photography in India 1858-1980 at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. Two years later, his photographs were shown alongside those by Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In 1986 he was included in Darshan: An Exhibition by Ten Asian Photographers at Camerawork, London, alongside other significant South Asian contemporary photographers and artists, such as Zarina Bhimji, Sunil Gupta, Mumtaz Karimjee and Ashvin Gatha. The exhibition was created in response to Britain’s colonial legacies under the premise that ‘Asian presence has grown, and so has their contribution, material and cultural, to British society at large’ (Hiro, 1986). Alongside Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman and Gupta, among many others, Janah’s photographs were shown in Fine Material for a Dream…?: A Reappraisal of Orientalism at the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston in 1992. In 1997 he held a solo exhibition at the newly-founded Nehru Centre, London, established to promote cultural exchange between India and the UK. Other significant exhibitions that year included the group shows India: A Celebration of Independence 1947-1997 at the Royal Festival Hall, London and The Drum: Sunil Janah, Juginder Lamba and Surji Simplay at the Custard Factory, Birmingham. Both the BBC and ITV made short documentaries about Janah’s work around this time (Warren, 2006). Ram Rehman, son of the world-renowned dancer, Indrani Rehman, himself a photographer and later holder of Janah’s archive, arranged a large exhibition of Janah’s photographs, Sunil Janah: Photographs 1939-1971 at Gallery 678 in New York, USA in 1998.
In 2003 Janah retired with his wife to Berkeley in California, USA. Their daughter, Monua Janah, died tragically a year later (Tiwari, Revolutionary Democracy). In 2010, Janah featured in the exhibition Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Sunil Janah died two years later in Berkeley, USA on 21 June 2012. The following year, a comprehensive book of his work, which he had been working on until his death, was published by Oxford University Press India. In the UK public domain, two versions of his photograph of anti-Imperialist demonstrations on Rashid Ali Day in 1942 are held in the V&A collection, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Sunil Janah]
Publications related to [Sunil Janah] in the Ben Uri Library