Many years ago, I attended a specially choreographed exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, dedicated to the life and work of Margaret Bourke-White. She had a knack for being in the right place at the right time: she interviewed and photographed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on January 29, 1948, just hours before his assassination. Gandhi used to call her his torturer. In the Oscar-winning film Gandhi (Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film), her persona was portrayed by Candice Bergen.
Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, a staff photographer for Life magazine. In 1930, she was the first foreign photographer officially permitted to document industrial sites in the Soviet Union during the first Five-Year Plan. Credited with photographing Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin, she also captured the construction of the Fort Peck Dam, which appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s inaugural issue.
Margaret captured many of the defining moments of the 20th century. Her work during the Great Depression documented the lives of Dust Bowl residents. She is also considered the first female war correspondent to cover combat during the Second World War. She was the first American female war photojournalist with the U.S. Army Air Forces, documenting the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and joining Patton’s Third Army in spring 1945 to photograph the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1949, she was among the first Americans to highlight the injustices of South African apartheid through her photos, and she covered the Korean War for Life magazine in the early 1950s.
Bourke-White is also renowned in India and Pakistan for her photographs. Several images from the 1947-48 Partition have stayed with us, and most were taken by her. She captured images of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. As a prominent chronicler, she documented the violence that erupted during India’s and Pakistan’s 1947 independence and Partition. Sixty-six of Bourke-White’s photographs documenting the Partition violence were featured in a 2006 reissue of Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan. Because no memorial to the victims of the Partition exists in India, all we have are her photographs to remind us of those dark days. I also remember a photograph of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at his home, Rajgriha, in Dadar, Mumbai, taken during the third edition of his book Thoughts on Pakistan, published in December 1940.
I was so captivated by her several Identity Cards and personal items at the exhibition that I ended up reading a book published by Roli Books, titled “Witness To Life And Freedom: Margaret Bouwke-White in India & Pakistan.” This is a very well-written book, and I found only one drawback: a foreword by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, written in a very cold and dry style. Margaret writes: “I arrived in India in the early spring of 1946. The groundwork for independence was being laid, and I stayed for most of that year, traveling about the country. Then I came home – found I wanted to learn more about India, and returned to spend part of 1947 and 1948 there.”
Many of the well-known facts we have heard about Gandhi are authenticated by her, including the account that, while traveling to Shimla in early 1947, Gandhi insisted on traveling in third-class trains with his followers and his goats, as he had renounced cow’s milk; the herd was essential. He needed, in fact, a group of third-class trains, as one was not enough for his followers. Sarojini Naidu was correct when she remarked that Gandhi ought to realize how much it cost to keep him in poverty. This single statement almost ended her bright political career.
Another eye-opening incident she observed: “The members of the working press in Delhi had formed the habit of visiting the Bhangi Colony every day to observe the mounting preparations for Gandhi’s arrival, which had been underway for several days. The residents of half the Bhangi Colony had been moved out – I never discovered where, perhaps to that part of the colony which had been left in its virgin squalor.”
Then there is a chilling account. I quote her: “I remember visiting the frightfully littered railroad station after an attack which had cost the lives of a thousand Muslim refugees, and seeing a row of dignified-looking Sikhs, venerable in their long beards and wearing the bright blue turbans of the militant Akali sect, sitting cross-legged all along the platform. Each patriarchal figure held a long-curved saber across his knees – waiting quietly for the next train.”
Margaret also confirms what Maulana Azad used to say: “When Jawaharlal talks in his sleep, he speaks in English.” So, India’s first prime minister, who was to transform the country, was in fact an Englishman.
There are many interesting incidents written humorously, such as when Margaret entered the Kremlin to photograph Stalin, expecting a towering figure, in accordance with the hoardings she had seen all over the Soviet Union. She was shocked to find “a short, pockmarked man who wouldn’t be drawn into conversation.” She says that Mohammed Ali Jinnah rose to prominence as a young leader of the Indian National Congress, with a faith in Hindu-Muslim unity, but it cannot be denied that “he was ‘out of place!’ in the Gandhian-led movements and averse to Nehru’s Socialist republic.”
An interview with Jinnah includes the following lines: “…….The determination to establish a separate Islamic State came not from some Muslim divine in archaic robes, but from a thoroughly Westernized, English-educated attorney-at-law with a clean-shaven face and a razor-sharp mind….a leader of the Muslim League and architect of Pakistan, had for many years worked at the side of Nehru and Gandhi for a free, united India, until in the evening of his life he broke sharply with his past to achieve a separate Pakistan.” “We never expected to get it so soon,” Miss Fatima said. “We never expected to get it in our lifetime.” She says that “if Fatima’s reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother’s was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah’s deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement.”
Regarding the confrontations between some prominent Congressmen and Socialists, she says: “Part of the Congress for many years, the Socialist Party broke away from the ideology of Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel, with a large number of left-wing members. One of the founders of the Socialist Party, Jayaprakash Narayan, while explaining one of the reasons to me, said, ‘Patel believes in patching up the old garment of our economy – we believe in making a completely new garment. As for Nehru, a great man as he is, he hesitates. He is waiting for Congress to make up its mind. Government economic policy is hardly shaped by Nehru; Patel does the real shaping.’”
Let us accept that India’s official history books, which we were taught in school, were written by Oxford-educated historians who relied on sources biased toward British perspectives and on narratives favored by the Indian National Congress, especially those of Gandhi and Nehru. As a result, schoolbooks often present a distorted version of history. To understand the true history, it is essential to consult firsthand accounts from newspapers of that era or credible contemporary books like this one.
