Kulwant Roy

Kulwant Roy (1914, Village Bagli Kalan, District Ludhiana, Punjab, British India – 1984) was an Indian photographer. As the head of an agency named "Associated Press Photographs", he was personally responsible for several iconic images of the Indian independence movement and the early years of the Republic of India.

Born in 1914, Kulwant Roy grew up in Lahore before joining the Royal Indian Air Force where he specialised in aerial photography. After being discharged from the RIAF, he returned to Lahore, but moved to Delhi in 1940 where he set up a studio, which later expanded into a full=fledged agency, in the Mori Gate district of Old Delhi. For a few years previously, he had been following Mahatma Gandhi in his travels around India in a third-class train compartment; that experience permitted him to gain insider status that meant that he was permitted to record many crucial events of and major participants in the independence movement, including Jinnah, Nehru and Patel.

Among his most iconic photographs are one of Jinnah arguing with Gandhi on the verandah of his bungalow; normally credited to the Hulton-Getty archive, it has recently been established that it was one of many such taken by Roy. Others include a similarly well-known photograph of Nehru and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan walking as AICC representatives to meet the Cabinet Mission while a rickshaw carrying Patel travels alongside. A photograph of Nehru and Patel listening intently to Gandhi at a Congress Working Committee meeting was made into a commemorative stamp after Patel's death in 1950; it won a silver plaque from Amrita Bazar Patrika as the best news photograph of the year.

After independence in 1947, Roy continued to photograph Nehru in particular, taking several photographs of the Nehru-Gandhi family and one of Nehru sitting pensively in cricket flannels, his chin resting on his bat. Also in the 1950s, he was one of the first to document the trek by pilgrims to the cave at Amarnath in Kashmir.

In 1958 he packed up his studio and set out on a trip around the world. For three years he took almost continuous photographs, visiting more than thirty countries, and every month mailing the previous month's negatives back to his office in India. When he returned in 1961, he discovered to his horror that all the packages had been stolen. For years thereafter he would spend weekends driving around garbage dumps in Delhi looking for the lost negatives.

He died in New Delhi in 1984, working till the end; at the time of his death from cancer he was working on the negatives of the Seventh Non-Aligned Movement Conference.

He left his surviving photographic negatives and archives to his nephew Aditya Arya,(http://www.adityaarya.com/) a commercial photographer. The are now a part of his Aditya Arya Archive. This collection, which Arya is scanning and organizing, reportedly contain images exhaustively chronicling most major incidents of the period, including the Cripps Mission and the INA trials; after independence, they include a series documenting the development of the Bhakra-Nangal dam and photographs from the front of the Sino-Indian War, which he organised by day.