TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY AANCHAL MALHOTRA
New Delhi, India
I am writing this piece exactly two years to the day since my maternal grandfather passed away. Two years is not nearly enough to grow accustomed to someone’s absence, but you do familiarize yourself with it through what continues to remain, and my grandfather was a voracious collector of objects. At one point, his stack of National Geographic magazines was taller than I was! After his passing in 2023, we began the long task of sorting through his life – official papers, catalogues and newspapers from around the world, travel brochures and in-flight magazines (which became a family duty to collect and deliver – so much so that the mere sight of one can now reduce me to tears), clothes of miscellaneous sizes, luggage we had not seen him use in decades, medicines, and all kinds of instruments. In that slow work of organizing a life, I came to inherit a typewriter and two of the many cameras through which he once saw the world.
Vishwa Nath Vij was born in 1936 in Amritsar to a family originally from Lahore. He was the second of five children, and the first in his family to sit in an aircraft and fly anywhere. In 1958, he left Delhi to pursue a Master’s degree in Soil Sciences at the Ontario Agricultural College in a rural town called Guelph, arriving in Canada on a two-year scholarship. There, he had a thriving social life, played varsity soccer, and wrote his thesis on sugar beet fertilization – I know all this because he regularly mailed annotated photographs back to his family in Delhi.
A few years ago, my aunt gave me this set of photos in a ziplock bag – small, black-and-white prints, some gently curling at the corners, the ink on their backs now faint with time. At first, I enjoyed them as a playful gaze into my grandfather’s life across the world, but I’ve since begun to consider them as a testimony about time, reading them as I would a biography, especially since in his absence, so many questions remain unanswered. One of my last proper conversations with my grandfather was in March 2023, before his health rapidly deteriorated – my cousin and I had used these very photographs to do memory exercises. I thought there would be more such sessions, where we would travel into the past together, but there were none.
Perhaps the only simple thing about this archive is its scope; that the photographs are not endless. Knowing my grandfather though, there were probably more images that got lost or dispersed over the years, and these are all that remain. They span roughly twenty years, from 1959, a year after he arrived in Canada, to 1978, when he and my grandmother returned to India. Yet this finiteness doesn’t make it any easier to piece these fragments together – which brings me to the cameras.
Of the two cameras I inherited, one is a Yashica Lynx-5000 and the other, a Ricoh 35 Electronic – both are of Japanese make, but neither were available when 22-year-old Vishwa first arrived in Canada. The Yashica, introduced around 1962-63, was a manual camera with a 35mm fixed lens, a built-in light meter, and attempted to compete with the higher-end Minoltas or Canons, but at a more accessible price. The Ricoh was introduced only in 1968, and was one of the first fully electronically-controlled 35mm cameras. It was innovative for its time, since the shutter speed and exposure were electronic, making it one of those machines at the cusp of the analog-to-electronic shift in consumer photography. Both cameras would have been sold through major department stores like Eaton’s or Simpson’s, which my grandfather would have frequented, and later, my grandmother even worked at.
I am surprised to learn that neither camera could have been used to take the earliest images. His sister-in-law also tells me that Vishwa didn’t have a camera before he left, and neither could he afford something so expensive at the time. So, I can assume that he was introduced to photography only in Canada, and used either a friends’ camera to begin with, or a different instrument. But I cannot say this with certainty; all I can do is read the photographs – as evidence and memory, of course, but also as correspondence.
The set of photos from 1959 include shots of the Ontario Agricultural College campus, the administrative buildings and labs, landmarks in the city of Toronto (which would have been the closest major city to him), his friends, travels, and even the trophies he received playing soccer. There are multiple profile shots of him, and a few that even look to be like modern-day selfies. The prints are both square and rectangular, which means that he was either using different cameras or experimenting with different film types. Many of the prints have the decorative scalloped edges that were a hallmark of the 1940s-70s. Prints were also often stamped with the month and year, which was a record of printing rather than shooting – so it is entirely possible that these photographs were taken earlier and only developed in 1959.
But what makes them really special, sitting at the the crossroads of personal correspondence and photographic history, are the notes at the back, written in Hindi and English. The handwriting is incredibly neat – I would expect nothing less – and given the deposits of ink in the letters, looks to be written with a fountain pen. There are photos in different seasons, but one particularly catches my attention. It is dated February 1959. Vishwa is wearing a thick coat, a layer of snow has collected in the background and on the trees behind him. He is smiling, and his hands are tucked inside the coat pockets, as if he’s chilly.
Behind the photograph, he writes in English, “Hello, Everybody. This is Vishwa speaking to you from Guelph-Canada. Guess that everybody is enjoying best of health. With regards to all & love to Bholi & Minoo. Vishwanath. P.S- Rest of photographs sent by ordy. mail.” As I look at it, I remember the first time I experienced snowfall – that joyous, frigid excitement – having made the same journey to study in Canada half a century later. In the tender note, Vishwa sends love to all, but especially his younger sister and baby niece. He is also particular to mention that more photographs are arriving by “ordy.” (ordinary) mail, which led me to do some research.
Making a phone call across the world was expensive at the time. My grandaunt, who lives in Toronto, recalls how even in the 1970s, they’d send news back to India on 10c aerogrammes rather than through a phone call, which cost $3.50 per minute with an approximate wait time of three hours. Even if Vishwa could have afforded such a call, his house in Delhi didn’t have a phone to receive it yet.
Looking back now, I imagine he relied on aerogrammes too, but soon began sending photographs home. He was the first member of his family to cross an ocean and live in a world so different, that photos must have felt fuller and richer than just words. Between his departure in September 1958 and his first trip home in December 1963, these photographs were the only way his family actually saw him. Sending them may have been his way of softening the distance, to reassure them, to let them study his face, be a part of the things he was doing, the friends he was making, and visualize the places he wrote about. His comment about “ordy” mail suggests he may have tucked a photograph or two into an air-mail envelope – which would reach in days – and then sent the larger bundles by surface mail, travelling by ship and taking several weeks to arrive.
Writing behind a print from April 1959, he jokes about how they play the National Game of India, “Gulli Danda” on campus, mentioning his friends, Chandool from West Indies and Hoque from Dacca. Another photo from 1961 shows his friends Dilbagh and Linda, Linda’s grandmother and Vishwa, looking at something on the table. Behind it, he writes “Hum log Linda ki Grandmother ki stamp collection dekh rahe the. Back ground mein kitchen dikhai deta hai.” A third photo from 1961 shows him sitting beside a bronze sculpture made by a friend. The note on the back reads, “Yeh piece usne 2 1/5 mahine mein banaya hai. Subject – Labourer at work. Keemat $500 lagayi hai, $400 ka offer usse aa chuka hai! Weight 26 lbs hai!”
I often picture the moments of receipt – the Vij family gathered around an envelope in Delhi, passing each print from hand to hand, noting whether Vishwa looked leaner or healthier, delighted that he had made the college soccer team, commenting on the kitchens, buildings, parks, and monuments of this faraway place, traveling with and through him. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that “images were first made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent.” And with that in mind, I imagine each photograph reminding them that their son is always within reach.
A set of 11 photographs that Vishwa sent home from a trip to New York City and Washington D.C in 1961. Top row (L-R) Outside the White House, Jefferson Memorial, U.S Capitol Building, Lincoln Memorial. Middle row (L-R) Jefferson Memorial, Washington Monument, Empire State Building observation deck, aboard a ferry on the Potomac River. Bottom row (L-R) Plaza of the Rockefeller Center, United Nations Headquarters, a Manhattan skyscraper.
As his world grew, these photographs charted its expansion. In 1961, Vishwa takes a trip to New York City and Washington, D.C., sending home several numbered photographs of himself standing before American monuments. I often catch myself admiring his style – that shirt and those trousers would not look out of place today. He is wearing Indian sandals on more than one occasion. These are typical holiday images – some posed, some more candid and nonchalant. But hanging on his shoulder in each of these images is a camera. Maybe the same one that took all the early photographs, or maybe not. And who was taking the photos, I wonder? What photos did my grandfather’s camera take, and where are they?
What becomes clear, though, is that this hobby goes beyond mere documentation. His habit of carrying a camera everywhere speaks to a growing seriousness about the medium – one that would later reveal itself in the careful notes he taped to the back of the Yashica camera, recording manual settings so he could study them once the film was developed. It was an old technique, almost studious in its intent, suggesting an analytical man engrossed not only in making photographs but in understanding the depth of imagery itself.
the back of the Yaschica camera
Come 1964, my grandmother, Amrit begins to appear in the photographs – they were married that April. The frames start to widen, drawing in the younger brother who had, by then, also settled in Canada. Friends emerge too, figures I now recognise even in their old age, captured here in their youth. In 1972, Vishwa and Amrit bought their first house in Toronto. His elder brother and his wife came to visit from Delhi. At their departure, the group took a photograph, and at the far left side, Vishwa can be seen holding the case for his Yashica camera, which is likely taking the photo.
I’m often struck by the range of faces in his photographs. Canada in the 1950s and 60s was not free of prejudice, yet his circle seems to cross every boundary – friends of all backgrounds, drawn together. I still wonder how he managed to do that. But in spending time with this archive, I’ve learned that the deeper you look, the more a story can resist completion.
Top Row (L-R) Amrit (in a silk sari) sitting with friends, Vishwa’s youngest brother, Lali holding my aunt, Mona, and family in Delhi.
Bottom Row (L-R) the lake at a National Park, Vishwa’s friends, Sam and Inder, the family at the airport in 1973
Inheriting a family archive is, in many ways, like learning to live with someone’s absence. There will always be something you don’t know, a gap that only they could fill. Sometimes you can feel more like a detective than a descendant. But somehow, these photographs give me a clearer sense of my grandfather. The writer in me is able to shape a portrait of him. He was worldly and well-travelled, of course, but also profoundly generous and attentive to those he loved, often putting their needs before his own. That tenderness, I think, is visible here too, in the way he composed his images. And when I study them, the very finite distance between us seems to narrow just a little bit.
