Gently framing the light

“The photograph is never taken — it is always given,” a common adage but one that speaks for every page of Nony Singh’s The Archivist (Dreamvilla Productions). To flip through the slim volume of black and white images is to be transformed all at once into intruder and confidant. You are conscious that you are privy to the deeply private, but you also feel that the host has invited you in, offered you a chair and fragments of themselves, even as you contemplate the responsibilities of carrying another’s secrets.

Nony Singh started taking photographs as a seven-year-old with a box-camera. Today she is 76 and The Archivist i s her debut book. As a young woman, she had never heard of “photography as a profession”. Years later, her eldest child would become one of India’s best-known photographers and bookmakers. Most people are known as children of their parents, but Nony has the rare distinction of being known as the mother of Dayanita Singh.

Nony (originally Ranjit Kaur) always believed the eldest of her four daughters would turn toward fine art or literature. She was “good at expression” but a fussy model when her mother, who liked to treat her children as dolls, dressed them up as Mother Mary, a Roman gypsy or a Marathi fisherwoman and then photographed them. The day Dayanita was to leave home for National School of Design, Nony took a photo of her daughter, hand on hip, gaze both impatient and loving, which also captured her outline. This photo proved portentous to Nony hinting at a child making her way in the world but graced by a mother’s shadow.

For Nony the urge to photograph doesn’t arise from the need to capture but also for a reverence, even obsession, with the past. Seated in front of a wall covered with framed images from the book, the black-haired lady says, “I am an archivist. Memories mean a lot to me. Moments once they pass they don’t come. I am a collector because I fall in love with something because I have captured it,” she adds, “If I lose the moment I get disturbed.”

Not one to take her camera outside, and preferring portraits to landscape, Nony focused on the women in her family with her Zeiss Ikon camera. The photos in the book reveal the pleasures of domesticity be it family holidays, fancy dresses and picnics, but like all family albums they warn of the passing of time, the fragility of youth and the impossibility of ensnaring the present.

Her house bears witness and the weight of these memories. An imperious green chest squats in the centre of the drawing room, filled with albums and covered with photo books. In anticipation of our meeting she has taken out blue clip files filled with newspaper cuttings of Dayanita’s work, hotel receipts and articles which once caught her interest — on the Kohinoor diamond, or her husband’s record wheat production — now jaundiced with age. “Clippings are safe. Computers I don’t feel are safe,” she says, as she rummages through the files even while taking more out.

She puts her iPhone on silent and brings out her iPad to share a video of Dayanita speaking about the Delhi Photo Festival. Guilty of a mother’s foibles, Nony favours praising her daughter to discussing her own work. The video refuses to boot, and she grumbles about her slow router and faulty connection. Even though photographs from the past surround her, this grandmother of two has clearly embraced the present, be it through gadgets, social networks or the world of instant photography.

She is now at ease with her Sony DSC RX 100. “To begin with, I was not comfortable with digital, I felt tied to the machinery. They have their own dictionary, you couldn’t choose apertures, distances. I didn’t have freedom,” she says. She now uses her camera to photograph images from the television — Jodha Akbar and Comedy Nights with Kapil Sharma being her two favourites — which requires a keen understanding of light, shadow and colour.

Even though she admits a love for all colours and for using them (unlike her daughter), she is partial to black and white as they commute her to the old Hindi movies, which she adored and which her father frowned upon. Growing up in a world where dancing and banter with the opposite sex were discouraged, Nony would often dream that she was hopping and skipping down an endless white corridor. The movies would lure her but remained a forbidden world, even as she made her sisters pose as Scarlett O’Hara and Sophia Loren. Guru Dutt she believes was especially talented in manoeuvres with light and shade. She says, “I am good. But I can’t be as good as that moviemaker.” With its focus on the everyday and family, the book doesn’t reveal Nony’s tumultuous life.

She moved to India as an 11-year-old after Partition. She was a mother of four young girls when the ’84 riots blazed through Delhi. When she lost her husband in 1982, she inherited a mountain of court cases, and was inundated by paperwork, court hearings and judicial nitty-gritty. Files now seethed with injunctions and demanded attention. At times she would don her husband’s turban while driving to and from court, in order to be mistaken for a man. Only the last three photos in the book, of bundles of files, “my strange and not-so-strange bedfellows” hint at this cloud of chaos that loomed above. Dayanita’s File Room spotlights the countless lives these files contain and have squandered, and thus takes forward and pays tribute to her mother’s battles.

The one photo opportunity Nony feels she missed out on is of those days in court. Having gone through nearly a 100 lawyers in 30 years, she wants to choreograph a photo of four lawyers walking down a corridor, with one shooting her a smirk. Clearly, the archivist has work yet to chronicle and share with the world.

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