India’s famous photographer Raghu Rai died on Sunday (26 April 2026) in a private hospital in Delhi. He was 83 years old. His son Nitin Rai told that he was fighting cancer for the last two years. According to Nitin Rai, he had earlier suffered from prostate cancer, which was treated. After this the cancer spread to the stomach, but the treatment was successful there too. Recently this disease had reached his brain and due to age related problems his condition worsened.
Raghu Rai was born in 1942 in Jhang, Punjab, which is now in Pakistan. He started photography from his elder brother S. Paul and gradually made his own identity in this field. He started his career in the 1960s and started working as a photographer in ‘The Statesman’ newspaper in 1965. Here he captured many major national events on camera. He also visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in 1968, when the British band ‘Beatles’ was present there. One of the famous pictures of Raghu Rai is the picture after the Bhopal gas tragedy, in which the lifeless body of an innocent child is seen. This picture of his became the center of discussion all over the world.
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Where did Raghu Rai work?
Raghu Rai left The Statesman in 1976 and became picture editor at ‘Sunday’ magazine. In 1977, he was selected by the famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum Photos, which is considered a major achievement of his career. After this, in 1980, he left ‘Sunday’ and joined ‘India Today’, where he worked as a photographer and picture editor. He covered the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 very closely and worked on it for a long time. Later he also wrote a book named “Exposure: A Corporate Crime” on this subject. He has also worked for a long time with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa.
Raghu Rai wrote more than 18 books
Throughout his career, Raghu Rai wrote more than 18 books on the people, culture and cities of India. His major books include “Raghu Rai’s India: Reflections in Color” and “Reflections in Black and White”. His work has also appeared in major international publications such as Time, Life, New York Times, Newsweek and The New Yorker. For his brilliant work, he was awarded the Padma Shri in 1972 for his coverage of the Bangladesh War. Raghu Rai is counted among the most influential photographers of India, and his demise is a great loss to the art and media world.
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