Margaret Bourke-White had in her time taken some fascinating pictures of life in pre-Independence India, some of them well celebrated like the famous Nehru pictures. What has struck me so deeply about her photographs is her concern for the under-privileged, which had taken her to the remotest corners of India documenting the ordinary lives of the people, man on the street, their struggles in the extremely difficult living conditions of the times. Not that the living conditions of our people have greatly changed for the better since but at least many of the social evils of the day have been eradicated with liberal education and the spread of literacy and a better standard of living.

Three of her photographs above show her grasp of the Indian reality so well : about a drought in rural India. Water had always been the biggest challenge , with a majority of our villages with no source of water except a truant monsoon.In the first of the pictures we see a cavernous village well, 200 years old, that had gone dry , with the villagers hovering over the rim of the village like tiny helpless creatures,powerless against the forces of nature,against a monsoon god who had always played fickle despite so many ritual sacrifices made by the believers. In the second one, we see a well in Mysore working at half capacity due to drought and from the still figures of the men and women around the well you can feel the hopelessness of the situation in which the well was almost dry and might not last long.

The third of the photographs is a commentary on India’s obnoxious social practice of untouchability, in which the people from the lowest castes are allowed to draw water not from the common village well but from their own well on the outskirts of the village. The drought of course affects them all,including the wells of the upper castes.

(Gratefully acknowledging pictures from Life's Archives of Indian Images)