Images of a city in perpetual motion

An ongoing exhibition of Raghubir Singh's photographs from the 1970s-90s captures the changing nature of life in Mumbai

- Akshay Mahajan

(Above) Raghubir Singh, 'Dabbawallah, or professional lunch distributor, Bombay', 1992; (top right) 'Crawford market, Bombay', 1993; (right) 'Victoria Terminus, Bombay', 1991.

(© 2026 SUCCESSION RAGHUBIR SINGH. COURTESY JHAVERI CONTEMPORARY)

It is hard to put into words why a photographer walks a city collecting images like beads. Perhaps it is all but a rehearsal to remember in the present that a place is always in flux, always being altered by time before one fully knows it.

When this feeling thickens, you return to these fragments—your archive—and see again that even in silence, something at the edge of the frame that you didn’t notice has lingered a little longer than it could in the world. The walk is not about destination but accumulation, a slow indexing of the world. In this sense, every photographer is also a note maker, part of a lineage that runs from Eugene Atget wandering Paris with his camera, to those who came after, carrying cities not as maps but as sequences.

To encounter Raghubir Singh: Bombay at Jhaveri Contemporary is to enter such a sequence already in motion. Photographs taken in the late 1970s to mid-90s gather around a city always in flux, then as it still is now. Singh, who passed away in 1999, once described this body of work as being “about the transformation of India”. Transformation into what? More importantly, who carries that transformation forward... the city or the image?