Historic pictures of India

Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah in a heated conversation. A well-known photograph recently attributed to Kulwant Roy.

String serenade

Nation Maker
Jinnah, sitting on a sofa like a modern potentate, surveys the scene from atop a truck at a procession in Allahabad in the 1940s, during a Muslim League session

Breadwinners
Workers gather to collect their wages from a ‘pay van’, as it was called, at the Bhakra Nangal project area in the 1950s

Tons Of Joy
Wrestling champ ‘Daula’ pins down his English adversary ‘Clark’, to the patent dismay of the referee, at a fundraiser for the Lahore Warplanes Fund, the Police Spitfire Fund and the Minto Park Fund, in Lahore in the late 1930s

Talks For Merger
Sardar Patel and the Maharaja of Patiala confer during a meeting of the Phulkian Union, an umbrella body of princely states, in Patiala, shortly after Independence

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru walk to a Congress meeting while Sardar Patel is pulled alongside in a rickshaw. Roy’s access provided him with ample opportunities for informal photographs.

Nehru with his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, in an undated photo from the Kulwant Roy Collection. (Aditya Arya Archives, Kulwant Roy Collection )