In September 2021, Assam police opened fire during an “encroachment eviction drive” in Darrang district, killing two Bengali Muslim men. Amid heavy monsoon, bulldozers tore down homes, leaving about 800 families exposed to the downpour and at risk of communicable diseases.
Soon after, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Vijoo Krishnan went to Assam to visit the refugee camps where the displaced were living. “They had suffered immense cruelty,” he says. “When I saw them, frames from the film Gandhi and the telefilm on Partition, Tamas, which depicted refugee camps, came to my mind. But what I witnessed in Assam was even more horrifying.”
Krishnan is a political activist and organiser, but another side of him emerges behind the lens—as a photographer. Photographs of the people of the Assam camps, which capture the deep scars inflicted by hate politics, were among the 60 evocative works displayed at his solo exhibition, ‘Of Land, Lives and Lores’, held from August 28 to September 3 at the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi Art Gallery, Kozhikode, Kerala.
A key organiser of several peasant struggles, including the Delhi Chalo march of 2020, Krishnan says his role as a photographer is not separate from his politics but unfolds alongside it, woven into the journeys and struggles of political life. He believes nothing surpasses a powerful frame when it comes to documenting the injustices humans inflict on one another.
Krishnan was in his early teens when he got his first camera from an uncle who was in the Merchant Navy. “It was an unusual National Panasonic camera—on one side a camera, and on the other side a built-in radio,” says Krishnan. Later, his younger sister gifted him a point-and-shoot Canon camera. A friend later gave him a DSLR in the 2010s, recognising his passion for photography. Yet Krishnan is no purist who thinks only images captured on professional cameras count as ‘real’ photography. He often turns to his mobile phone as well.
Over the years, his journeys as a political organiser have also become journeys as a witness with a camera, framing untold stories and unsung heroes. In the Nilgiris, he photographed a tribal woman facing eviction under an elephant corridor project. In Araku Valley, Andhra Pradesh, he captured the organising of Adivasi coffee farmers. And in Trichy, Tamil Nadu, he clicked Murugan, a head-load worker for more than 40 years. These faces, he says, are not just photographs but living testaments to struggles that might otherwise fade from memory.
Sometimes, the subjects themselves invite the lens. “There is this photograph of a Senegalese girl in the exhibition,” says Krishnan. “She reminded me of the song ‘Jamaica Farewell’, where Harry Belafonte sings of a little girl in Kingston Town. She appeared before me for just a few fleeting moments. I was taking a picture near the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar, and though we didn’t share a language, she simply gestured to me to take her photo. I chose not to show her full face—because half her face, I felt, carried a stronger resonance than the whole. That’s how that frame was born.”
Krishnan’s photographs, along with those of many comrades, were instrumental in generating early attention and social media momentum for the Kisan Sabha’s Long March in 2018. “Initially, the mainstream media did not give it much attention,” he says. “But some of the earliest pictures taken by us were widely shared by young people on social media. That helped build visibility. Later, many iconic pictures—like the blistered feet of a farmer—were taken by other photojournalists, which brought even more attention to the peasants’ struggle and their demands.”
There have also been risky moments he wishes he could have captured. “When we were protesting in Una against atrocities on dalits, upper-caste armed groups threatened us with swords and other weapons,” he says. “On another occasion, while travelling with one of my students in Nagaland, our two-wheeler broke down, and we were surrounded by seven armed men from the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang faction, all carrying AK-47s. They eventually helped us repair the scooter—but in that spur of moment, I couldn’t take photos.”
Krishnan is not particularly fond of taking selfies. “But whenever comrades or friends ask, I never refuse,” he says, noting that over the last 30 years he has been photographed with many prominent leaders of the Left movement in India and abroad. Yet, there is one photograph he regrets not having—a picture with former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. “Chávez had come for an event in Delhi that I also attended,” says Krishnan. “I wanted to take a photo with him, but it never happened.”