Tales from the Riverbank

In India, the river is a woman. The lithe sisters Yamuna and Ganga wind their way across the country. Slim goddesses in the heat, they become wide and swollen during the monsoons. Rivers give birth to gods and princes. Water washes away the sins of the fallen. The river drowns the wicked. The rushing water carries one's mortal remains to the next world. One night, a good Hindu wife waits for the reflection of the moonlight on the rippling surface to ensure her husband's future success. At misty dawn, she rises and walks in starlight to a lake to bathe away his sins. The monsoon is a festival for girls: standing on swings they fly into the trees, they tie-dye scarves, they dance and sing to the drumming of the rain on the roof. Women wash their saris and spread them to dry, making carpets of colour on the rivers' edges. The cracked riverbed of the drought becomes a road for goatherds and pilgrims; the full lake is a marketplace for floating shops. Mother India is a country of women and rivers.

Raghubir Singh is a lover of women and water. With one wife and a daughter, he's always surrounded by rumours of women: perhaps an Indian lover with another child, perhaps a girlfriend, perhaps a mistress, all his bright, pretty friends. And then there are all the women whose souls he's stolen with the lens of his camera. Singh has photographed India from the top to the bottom, from the icy waterfalls of the Himalayas along the edge of Tibet, to the flowery lakes of Kashmir, to the parched Rajasthan. Along the edge of the Ganges, to the sea that laps the shores of Kerala, the southernmost part of India.

In one of his earliest photographs, the romantic Women caught in monsoon rains, Monghyr, Bihar, the moment becomes a study of the draped female form, reminiscent of Cartier-Bresson's work in India. 'That picture has an appeal because of the idealised feel and lyricism of motion and form. It's simple, but at the same time it has an element of magic. Now one has gone on to more complex images.'

Raghubir Singh began taking pictures as a 13 year-old in Rajasthan in the mid-50s. He imitated images from the America-centric pages of Life and American Photographer, to create an overturned anthropology. 'I took pictures of everything. At home. At school. In the street. A lot of stuff in the street. At that time, one saw magazines and copied what they did.' The native studies his own culture. His photographs, like the Indian streets where he learned his trade, are a balancing act of architecture, space and humanity; an explosion of colour. 'The world exists in colour,' he says. Photographs like Red car and bus, near Trichur or Man and boy in front of shop-shutter advertisement for tea, Calicut, are as graphic and fluorescent as William Eggleston's pictures in Mississippi. The claustrophobic framing and subject of A cigarette and teashop in South Calcutta dumps the viewer hard onto a Calcutta sidewalk.

When I meet him, he is, as usual, wearing brown. A nondescript blazer (or is it a nylon jacket?), brown or grey trousers, a battered colourless scarf. His face is always obscured by his Clark Kent glasses. When I ask him about the contrast, he says, 'In general. I don't want to attract attention. I was like that even as a child.'

Singh dropped out of his English studies at university in Delhi to be a photojournalist, working with Time magazine and the New York Times reporter Joseph Llelyveld. 'They did the stories, I illustrated them.' He took historical pictures of the Congress party, of Indian politicians in a 20-years young country, of Jan Sang, now the infamous Hindu fundamentalist party, the BJP. 'But then I started shooting the Ganges in 1965. Just for myself.'

From there, he spent four years in Hong Kong, where he continued working as a photojournalist, recording the political upheaval in Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. 'Then I moved to Paris because I married a French woman. But I didn't take a lot of pictures in Paris, even though it is very pleasant place.' He feels the same way about London, where he lives now, 'I don't spend a lot of time there, photographically. I'm not at ease in industrial societies.' Is it a thirst for colour? Or the disappearing humanity?

'Modern urban societies are severe. There is industrialisation and industrial societies are necessarily severe. That's where the alienation comes in. Life is a different concept, families are smaller and more isolated. People become more inward-looking.' So he started taking pictures in India again. 'Basically, the book about Rajasthan was intuitive. I had been everywhere and I decided to come back to the state where I belong.' His book on the land of kings was his first and most personal. The pictures have the intimacy of family photographs. 'It was my biggest step as a photographer.'

More often than not, the people in Singh's photographs are staring directly at you, the way strangers do on the street, openly curious and confrontational. In A bridegroom and party, from the Marwari community, Calcutta, the groom's unselfconscious expression is so haunting that his eyes bore into one's mind, leaving an imprint that lasts for days. These are not the surreptitious glances of the alienated. If not questioning you, Singh's subjects are engaged with each other - playing, praying, working - but always looking out, not in. In that respect, Singh's photographs echo the work of other artists he admires: Helen Levitt's photographs of children and graffiti, Brassai's honest views of Paris in the 20s. The human forms in Singh's photographs, whether god or mortal, assert themselves with the viewer. 'How much of postmodern photography will survive? Very little. It's so facile. Because the individual has been wiped out. It's like looking at a radar screen. Even among portraitists. Most of the people doing portraits today use some stylistic contrivance, so that the style dominates the picture rather than something evoked from the individual. In contemporary photography, the individual becomes a metaphor. Look at Avedon's pictures. They're not about the individuals he photographs. You could switch one with another, it wouldn't matter.'

Not so with Raghubir Singh's women. In Indian society, the female wears the plumage. Brocade shalwar kameezes, silk saris, tie-dyed dupattas and mirror-worked laingas, glittering jewellery. Someone once told me that in a colonised country, it's women who guard the traditions and the culture (or are allowed to keep their native dress), while the male must bow to the conqueror, don his grey apparel. From the businessman's wife eating ice cream in a social club in Calcutta to the Kashmiri labourers in fields of saffron, she is the brighter of the sexes. There are two classic images of India: The maharani - peaceful, pampered princess - dripping with jewels. The lean working woman bent over her harvest, her bare feet covered with mud. These women are symbols, objects, jealously guarded property. Women in India should not be subject to the indignities of the photograph. The flimsy reproduction could be crushed under foot. It might be tossed beneath a pile of rubbish. Her cardboard self might fall into uncouth hands, exposing her to rough treatment and soiling her mortal reputation.

Somehow, Singh has managed to catch the archetypes, as well as the spectrum of women in between. And while his female subjects give up their souls, in return they gain dignity and personality. The women in Singh's photographs, human or goddess, defend themselves. Rarely are they beautiful objects. More likely, as they glare back at the viewer, they are strong, intelligent and self-possessed. Or they ignore the lens and brusquely get on with the business of life, without a sideways glance for the photographer. You feel silly and embarrassed for watching. Regardless of their social position, Singh's women belong to themselves. At least for that instant.

Singh draws his inspiration from everywhere, 'Cinema, painting, architecture. All of the visual arts. Everything from Titian to Matisse. And, of course, one has learned a lot from television.' The introduction to his book on Calcutta was written by one of its most famous residents, the Bengali film director, Satyajit Ray. Raghubir Singh reads a great deal, everything from Juan Goytisolo to V.S. Naipaul. The photographers he most respects are the early ones, from the 19th and early 20th centuries. 'They were putting the camera on a tripod, and in doing that, the act of composition becomes very considered. Much more so than when one has a small mobile camera. In the 19th century, the camera had a very dominant position, but the work had greater psychological depth to it than that of the latter part of the 20th century.' Yet, with his small camera, Singh's multi-dimensional Indian landscapes like Morning worshippers, Panchganga, Ghat somehow become as expressive and balanced as the French government work of Gustav Le Gray.

Currently, Raghubir Singh is expanding his work to include Africa and the Caribbean. 'My work is rooted in India, but now I'm looking at other places. I think India and Africa are fairly similar, in that there's a strong element of pictorialism. Traditional societies are always more pictorial, volume and mass are defined by colour. My best pictures are not about important things. What I've done is a cycle of things. I've done the river, I've done the cities, I've worked in the countryside. I've worked with people and I've worked with landscape.' And what had he been shooting in Africa? 'Women. Women doctors, mothers, girls.'

The Ganges and Kerala, The Spice Coast of India are published by Thames and Hudson.