 Action, camera, Chari!
He has probably watched and covered more cricket than any other photographer in the land in his time. And K N Chari is perhaps the only photographer to continue his professional duties into his eighties, long after most of his contemporaries have called it a day. When he was at the height of his career with ‘The Hindu’, he was one of the most popular cameramen in India, counting Test cricketers and other public figures among his friends and admirers. From some of the telling action shots he managed match after match, it was easy to believe he was a lucky photographer, to be present at the right place at the right time, but the truth was that he was so involved in his work, so hard working and conscientious that he developed a sharp intuition for drama and incident, anticipating the big moments with uncanny accuracy.
As a cricketer who came into contact with him in many of the first class matches I played, I found Chari a bundle of energy, a cheerful, dynamic presence at the ground long before the match started, chatting with officials, wisecracking with the players, and often surprising them with delightful action pictures of theirs, which they accepted with great pleasure. Those days, your picture did not make it to the sports page of the newspaper unless you achieved something out of the ordinary, and the prints that Chari gifted you were often the only pictorial records many of us possessed of our careers.
His story has been told many times over - how he started life as a water boy in ‘The Hindu’ and, during World War II, joined the armed forces, where he learnt photography from a Captain Mullworth, a keen photographer. How, returning to ‘The Hindu’ as a dark room assistant, he quickly rose to become the newspaper’s photographer, with plenty of encouragement from his bosses T S Dandapani Iyer, the art director, and G Kasturi, the editor.
Chari’s keen eye and nose for action produced several sensational pictures, of stumps flying, brilliant catches held and on one occasion, even a bat flying! On a particularly humid afternoon at the Brabourne Stadium, Bombay, M L Jaisimha’s bat flew high in the air when it slipped out of his hand, and Chari’s camera caught this unforgettable moment in superb detail, with the England wicket keeper and slip fielder looking up into the sky, and the bewildered batsman completely at a loss as to the whereabouts of his bat.
On more than one occasion, Chari’s alertness established beyond doubt the correctness of a stumping or runout verdict, in the face of sarcastic suggestions by the visiting press that Indian umpiring had done the overseas batsman in. One such instance involved the dismissal of Alvin Kallicharran, the West Indies batsman who threatened to deny India victory in the Madras Test of 1974-75. The left hander stood his ground after being declared run out by a throw from Ashok Mankad, and the West Indies team felt they had been wronged. Until Chari’s photograph that appeared in ‘The Hindu’ next morning did the job of third umpire to precision!
Chari in his heyday was more than a cricket photographer, as he covered a wide range of events, political and social and man-made and natural disasters, with courage and the barest minimum of facilities. He often risked life and limb in the performance of his duties, but what made him stand out as an exceptional member of his tribe were his outspokenness and willingness to speak up for its rights. He is that rarity among professionals - a character rich in experience and strong on individuality.
V Ramnarayan
vramnarayan@gmail.com
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