Meet the man who shot Pt Nehru

THE MAN BEHIND NEHRU: It took Sahni 18 years and a long standing promise to capture the other side of Nehru.

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Keywords: Sat Paul Sahni, Photographer

Srinagar: The country knows Jawaharlal Nehru as India's first Prime Minister, a scholar and a statesman.

Now, journalist-cum-photographer, Sat Paul Sahni, has come out with the lighter moods of the statesman.

Sahni closely followed the former Prime Minister on his visits to Kashmir and by the end of it, the photographer had a collection of 500 personal photos that the world had never seen before.

But taking pictures of Nehru came with certain conditions.

"No photograph of personal nature could be published or sold without Pandit Nehru's permission. Also, I had to give him a copy of every photograph that I took of his - a promise that I I kept till his death," says Sahni.

Sahni was true to his word even after Nehru's death in 1964. Even the offer of a $1000 per photograph from Times magazine could not tempt him to break his promise.

"Professional ethics did not allow me to sell Pandit Nehru's photos and another reason was that I did not want to let these rare photos to go out of India," says he.

Four decades after Nehru's death, Sahni has finally decided to donate some photos to the University of Jammu. The collection, captured with a 1945-Roliflex model, portrays some of the intimate moments of India's first prime minister.

"He had all the faults any human being could have. He could fly into a temper, express immense joy and had many likes and dislikes like he would eat, well drink well and smoke well," says the photographer.

Nehru was a man usually associated with a rose and a cap that has come to be called the Nehru cap, but it took a keen lensman 18 long years and a long standing promise to capture the other side of India's first prime minister.