Clicking Indira Gandhi’s close-up pics while she was standing in a crowd

On the former prime minister’s 37^th death anniversary today, the writer reminisces how The Eves Weekly carried his pictures of Indira Gandhi on its covers. The Asiaweek magazine from Hong Kong, Imprint, New Delhi, The Week, and many other magazines also used his pictures of her on their covers

Picture Talk/By NK Sareen

From the mid-seventies to the early eighties, Indira Gandhi was the favourite subject and the biggest attraction for me in Delhi. Whenever I was in National Capital, I always kept track of every function or event she was likely to attend, or press conferences she was going to address, through my friends in the news agencies.

Initially, it wasn’t easy for me, but after she lost the election in 1977 and was voted out of power, it became much easier to get close access to her at the functions she attended, which had become an almost weekly affair for her.

In a short span of about three years, I got some of my best pictures of her. I remember once, during a Congress function at the party headquarters, I was the only photographer who stayed until the end of the function – the event lasted for more than two hours – for close-up pictures of her face.

She looked very depressed and dejected, and I was as close as about three feet from her with a telephoto lens constantly focused on her face. I didn’t want to miss that godsend opportunity since I had never had the chance to shoot her from that close range before. 

In those two-plus hours I exposed four rolls of film, in color and black-and-white, taking only close-ups of her face. The Eves Weekly carried my pictures of her twice on its covers. So did the Asiaweek magazine (Hong Kong), Imprint (New Delhi), The Week. Several other magazines also put my pictures of her on their covers.

One evening I had gone to Tibet House, where the Dalai Lama was slated to speak, and I was standing in the crowd waiting for him to emerge from the door when I suddenly noticed Indira Gandhi standing right next to me! In fact, she was standing so close to me that her left arm was touching my right arm. This black-and-white profile of her face was taken there with a normal lens and was published in the Asiaweek magazine.

It was astonishing that a person, access to whom was almost next to impossible just a couple of years ago, was standing next to me in the crowd waiting for another celebrated person to emerge from the door and speak, while she was there as an ordinary citizen. How time changes nobody can ever predict.

She finally lost her life to the bullets of her two security guards on 31st October 1984 at the prime minister’s residence when she was going for an interview with Peter Ustinov for a documentary for an Irish TV.

Unfortunately, I lost some of my best shots of her close-up images which I had given for the library of the Asiaweek magazine. After the magazine closed down, I never got back the lot of color images.

In this column, ‘Picture Talk’, veteran photojournalist NK Sareen, a former Photo Editor at Expanse International and a writer, shines light on some of the pictures of personalities he has clicked over the years, with a touch of nostalgia. The views expressed here are the author’s own and The News Porter bears no responsibility for the same.