From the 1950s right through the 1990s, Malayali photographer Punaloor Rajan documented the lives of the people who helped shape the state's political, cultural and literary foundation
Punaloor Rajan, 76, has not clicked a picture for 15 years. It is a strange but deliberate choice for a man who chronicled Kerala’s history from the time it became a state in 1956. His photographs, a drama in black and white, capture moments in the lives of Kerala’s literary, political and cultural figures at the height of the new state’s Communist movement.
Rajan, though no longer active, is still remembered by his subjects. At an April 2015 function in Thiruvananthapuram, the renowned but usually reserved Malayalam writer MT Vasudevan Nair, said: “Rajan might have been sent by god with a camera to spy on me.”
(This story appears in the July-Aug 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)