By June Gaur

As the year draws to a close, tributes pour in marking the centenary of a beloved son of Mysore, T. S. Satyan, born here in our city, on the 18th of December, 1923.

Satyan was fortunate to have been part of an iconic first generation of photo-journalists and to have lived a rich and fulfilling life in exciting times. Reams have been written about his work and its importance as a visual testimony to those times. But the archives of photo-journalism will tell us much less than we ourselves know of him as a person and a friend.

Satyan himself never quite forgot the excitement, or the precariousness, of his struggle for recognition in those fledgling years.

To recap a little: Shortly after Independence, a market had opened up for Indian photo-features in the West and Satyan was looking for an opportunity there. It came soon enough with the Mahamastakabhisheka at Shravanabelagola. Fingers crossed, he sent off his pictures with a small daub of haldi at the corners of the auspicious envelope.

Soon after, Life magazine commissioned the young Satyan to do a photo-story on Acharya Vinoba Bhave as he walked from village to village in Gujarat. For three days, he kept pace with India’s walking saint. On the fourth, he clicked the acharya as he stepped onto a row of stones in a patch of moonlight.

Satyan shared these and other memories in a documentary by the legendary film-maker, M.S. Sathyu. The year was 1994 and he had just turned seventy-one. A staggering volume of work spanning five decades was behind him. The timing was right for a deep dive into the stories, the intimate moments and emotions that lay behind each milestone.

Picture the setting: Satyan’s modest study in his Saraswathipuram home. The small room can barely accommodate lights and camera. The burly Sathyu is hunched into a chair in a corner from where he calls directions. Seated within hand-shaking distance of Satyan, my job is to cue him in from a script we have prepared in advance.

There is enchantment in the air as the two masters, close friends since their school days at Banumaiah’s, work in tandem. In the hushed room, an emotional Satyan relives the past half century, oblivious to time and the VHS tapes piling up.

The hours tick away and day turns to night. The producer is tearing his  hair. One of the lights has fused. The Bangalore-based crew will have to stay overnight in Mysore now. But Sathyu, patience on a monument, schools the room — “when an artist is talking about his struggle, don’t rush him.”

We all know how keen Satyan was to leave his work in one place, so that future generations could see Life as it was then. He would allow nothing to distract him from this resolution, not even a bypass surgery and reduced mobility.

He was very particular about answering correspondence promptly and never missed his daily chakkar to the Saraswathipuram Post Office. The written word was a great comfort to him and the internet became increasingly indispensable as arthritis forced him to cut down on his walks around Manasagangothri.

He was constantly pushing the boundaries for himself and others. Supported by his wife Ratna, he would sort through carefully stored boxes of pictures and negatives. In 1998, when he turned 75, a retrospective of his work was held in important cities around the country and people got to see something of his impressive oeuvre. An  unknown photographer at the Bangalore venue clicked a poignant picture of a tired Satyan asleep on a narrow bench, resting alongside some of his famous pictures.

A few years later, a hard-  cover collection, In Love with Life: A Journey through Life in Photographs “an indulgent celebration of the ordinary,” grew out of this retrospective.

Satyan’s pictures will never be dated; his celebrated black and white pictures defy slotting by age. An exhibition of his photographs has just concluded at the ultra-modern Museum of Art & Photography in Bangalore that opened only this year. The universal and timeless nature of his work ensures that T.S. Satyan will not “go gentle into that good night”; he will not fade away.

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