Indian Independence movement and
Jinnah in a heated conversation; a well-known photograph recently attributed to Kulwant RoyBorn 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.
Later years and death 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. This collection is in the process of being scanned and organised, and reportedly contains 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. ==Exhibitions and publications==