Jagdish 'Jaggu' Rane

Jagdish Rane — Jaggu to everyone from the milkman to the municipal corporator — inherited his camera from an uncle who had used it for exactly one purpose, photographing a single disputed boundary wall for a court case that ran eleven years and settled nothing. Jaggu, fifteen at the time, found the Rolleiflex more interesting than the boundary wall and began, without much permission, photographing everything else instead.

He wanted, in the years that followed, to be a photojournalist of the serious kind — the kind whose pictures appeared in the big Bombay magazines, the kind who went to the border during the '71 war or covered the floods in Assam, the kind whose name was printed under the photograph in small capital letters. He sent two portfolios to two publications in his early twenties and received, in reply, one polite rejection and one no reply at all, which he has always considered the ruder of the two.

Around the same time his father's small provisions shop was sold to pay a debt, and the family needed an income faster than a photojournalism career in Bombay was likely to produce one. A neighbour getting married needed someone cheap to photograph the event; Jaggu had a camera and no better offer. He was paid eighty rupees and a large plate of food, and within two years he had a studio — one room, a hand-painted backdrop of a garden that existed nowhere, and a sign reading Rane Colour Studio though for the first decade everything he shot was black and white.

Rane Colour Studio still stands on the same lane, the backdrop long since replaced by three different ones depending on the season, and Jaggu still develops his own film in a back room that smells permanently of fixer and dust, a smell his assistants have learned to consider, without irony, the smell of a proper photograph.

At a wedding he is less a hired hand than a small dictator, arranging seventy relatives into rows with two words and a raised finger — chhote log aage, small people to the front — and an instinct, honed over four thousand functions, for the precise half-second when the bride's mother's face will do something worth keeping forever. Three generations in the neighbourhood know his voice before they ever properly see his face, since he is, by the nature of the job, always the man behind the flash rather than in front of it.

He eats last at every wedding, after the guests, after the family, often standing near the kitchen with a plate balanced on one arm while he reviews the day's shots on the back of the camera, and more than once he has photographed the ruins of the buffet table itself — the wilting garlands, the emptied trays, the single abandoned chair — for no client, for no reason he has ever offered anyone who asked.

In 1996 he bought a roll of black-and-white film intending to shoot something of his own choosing on a free Sunday, and the free Sunday never quite arrived; the roll sits in his cupboard still, unopened, filed by year like everything else in that room, among four thousand other people's happiest days.

There was a season, not long ago, when a photographer from the city came through with a digital camera and undercut every studio in the market, and Jaggu's business slowed for the better part of a year before steadying, because it turned out that the mothers of brides still preferred a man who would take a whole roll to get one correct frame of the mangalsutra rather than a boy who took four hundred frames of everything and called it coverage.

He is, by now, an institution rather than a man, the fixed point around which half the neighbourhood's albums revolve, and if you ask him whether he minds having photographed everyone else's happiest day for thirty years instead of the mountains and the flood and the famine he once imagined, he will laugh, adjust the strap on his neck, and tell you, quite reasonably, that a man must eat, before turning his lens on whichever small child has just wandered, gloriously, into the wrong part of the frame.