A BOOK OF REBEL YELLS

National Awardwinning film editor, filmmaker and photographer Tarun Bhartiya left Delhi to live and work in Shillong, his hometown. His first photobook after his death reminds us of the importance of his image-making of Meghalaya's uranium curse, and the resistance to it exemplified by its icon, Kong Spellity.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

To Outsiders, and for this journalist from Delhi, photographer-filmmaker Tarun Bhartiya was the key to open up a certain Meghalaya removed from tourism brochures—to know that there were people who wanted to be Christians on their own terms; the indirect pressure towards an indigenisation of the Khasi church from non-Christian Khasis and a Christian revivalism as a fallout; that women theologians wanted the right to be ordained pastors.

Bhartiya also spotlighted Thomas Jones, a Welsh missionary, who rebelled against the East India Company and sided with the local population, as a reason why, unlike in other parts of India, in Meghalaya, the missionary is not a dirty word.... Bhartiya was not just interested in the good fights. His camera picked a side.

Bhartiya spent his childhood in Shillong, he went to college and did his masters in Delhi and worked with NDTV in its initial years. Married into a Khasi family, he died last January at his home in Shillong. Em. No. Nahi., his first photobook made from work of several decades, is now available at bookshops. It takes its cues from the eponymous exhibition that he had mounted at the National Photo Festival in Ahmedabad just weeks before he died of a sudden heart attack.

in black and white

Published by Yaarbal Books, Em. No. Nahi. is 205-pager structured like a journal through which Bhartiya speaks. Its images are punctuated by field notes, things he observed, often from within a moving vehicle.