This article is about Tarun Bhartiya and maps his life, work, and legacy as a documentary imagemaker, photographer, filmmaker, poet, editor, and political activist; it covers his upbringing in Shillong, his long-term commitment to working from Northeast India, his practice across film, photography, poetry, and translation, and his belief in aligning art with political resistance.
In the early 1980s, geological surveys identified some of India’s richest uranium deposits in the West Khasi Hills, and by the 1990s the state-owned Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) had begun exploratory drilling around Domiasiat with the aim of converting deposits into an open-cast mine. Officials and company representatives repeatedly offered landowners money and long-term leases, including a reported offer of Rs. 45 crore to Langrin for three decades of mining rights, hoping consent from a few landholding families would clear the way for full-scale extraction. Villagers and student bodies opposed the plan, arguing that uranium mining posed serious health risks, harmful environmental consequences, and would disrupt traditional ways of life. One of them was Kong Spillity Lyngdoh Langrin, a 90-year-old woman in a village in Domiasiat, Meghalaya, who said no to every offer, saying that no sum of money could justify surrendering her land. Her refusal helped stall the project, contributed to the eventual revocation of a mining lease in 2016, and became emblematic of broader community resistance to extraction in the region
Tarun Bhartiya, a documentary imagemaker, poet, social activist, and photographer — spent nearly two decades following that movement, walking with villagers, recording their everyday lives, conversations and protests, and building a body of visual testimony around that simple, farm-stead refusal. After his sudden death in January 2025, his close collaborators and wife Angela Rangad brought his project to fruition as a photobook titled 'Em No Nahi', published by Yaarbal Books in late 2025. The book is composed of 72 stunning black-and-white photographs with one small colour image, interspersed with text and reflections, and includes a guide to uranium mining and nuclear power. The book opens with images of Kong Spillity’s funeral and moves through sequences that establish both the human and ecological contours of the struggle: daily life in Domiasiat, rituals and gatherings, protest processions, skyscapes, and arresting portraits.
Tarun Bhartiya (1970–2025) was born of Maithil origins and grew up in Shillong’s Khasi Hills, a space that was itself shaped by histories of cultural contact, political struggle, and shifting identities. He would spend much of his life negotiating that terrain — aesthetically, politically, and socially, making it visible through multiple mediums.
Tarun was simultaneously a documentary filmmaker, editor, photographer, poet, activist, and thinker. His work across these fields was driven by curiosity, solidarity, and an insistence that the tools of art could be aligned with the tools of resistance.
As a filmmaker, he worked across documentary formats. His individual works include 'The Brief Life of Insects' (2015), which won the Best Sound Award at the Mumbai International Film Festival, 'The Last Train in Nepal' (2015, BBC4), and 'Darjeeling Himalayan Railway' (2010, Royal Television Society Award). He also contributed as an editor to films such as 'Red Ant Dream' (directed by Sanjay Kak), an influential account of the Maoist movement in Central India, and 'Jashn-e-Azadi'. In 2009 he received the National Film Award for editing 'In Camera: Diaries of a Documentary Cameraman' — an award he returned in 2015 as part of a broader protest by writers, artists, and filmmakers against what he and others described as rising intolerance and shrinking space for dissent in India, including state silence on communal violence, aggressive security laws, and the erosion of civil liberties.
Tarun's photography emerged from the same ethics as his moving images: deep engagement, and an emphasis on the dignity of everyday life. His black-and-white images of Meghalaya articulate the region’s landscapes and peoples with a sincerity that refuses exoticism. He photographed mountains, clouds and huts as terrain shaped by livelihoods, seasonal work, and long histories of the community. His frames consistently anchored people and places within the economic, social, and political conditions that shaped their lives, whether they were marching against mining, harvesting crops, or gathering in village squares.
His poetry, written primarily in Hindi, appeared in anthologies such as 'Dancing Earth: Contemporary Poetry from North-East India' and circulated through small journals and magazines. Alongside original poems, he was involved in translation work that moved writing from the Northeast into Hindi and English, reflecting his interest in language as a political and cultural site. His poems frequently addressed displacement, migration, class divisions, ecological damage, and the uneven impact of development in the region, linking personal observation to questions of land, labour, and power as opposed to treating identity as a purely inward or lyrical concern.
Describing himself as a “middle-class, Maithil Marxist documentary imagemaker from Shillong, India and a usual cussed lefty with libertarian overtones”, his political stance was shaped by Marxist analysis, libertarian sensibilities, anti-statist scepticism, and a solidarity with working peoples and indigenous movements. His friends and collaborators described him as a committed anarchist who spoke and wrote consistently against inequality, oppression, and authoritarianism, regardless of whether it came from state conservatism or corporate power.
In an interview with Scroll, Bhartiya explained that his photographs often grew out of personal curiosity and everyday social interaction. He spoke about wanting to know people better, spending time in conversation, sharing gossip, and being present within political movements he was already involved in. Photography, for him, was part of that process of participation and observation. This way of working shaped his practice in Meghalaya, where his images developed through repeated visits to village meetings, protests, domestic spaces, and public gatherings, allowing the work to accumulate through long-term engagement with people and places.
Bhartiya’s photographs move between public events and everyday situations within the same visual field. Processions, village rituals, funerals, and protests appear alongside scenes of agricultural work, domestic interiors, and open landscapes. The sequencing places human figures, objects, and surroundings on the same visual plane, allowing faces, clothing, soil, banners, and terrain to register through texture and tonal detail. His compositions rely on this accumulation of material detail to hold attention, using surface, light, and framing to convey how political action, daily labour, and landscape coexist in the same lived environment over time.
Bhartiya’s career unfolded in Northeast India, a region shaped by layered histories of colonialism, missionary influence, insurgency, and indigenous autonomy movements. His work 'Niam/Faith/Hynniewtrep' — a long-term project — explored the interactions of faith, identity, and politics among the Khasi people, a community negotiating change in a globalised world while struggling to retain its own traditions and meanings. This project drew on extensive field visits, interviews with community members, visual documentation, and collaborations with local writers and scholars to trace how indigenous belief systems, Christianity, and external cultural forces intersect in everyday life. By presenting images, texts, and public exhibitions, Niam/Faith/Hynniewtrep circulated these conversations beyond academic spaces into public cultural forums.
The anti-uranium movement documented in 'Em No Nahi' belongs to wider debates about land rights, environmental justice, and state power in India. What distinguishes the Domiasiat struggle is the way decision-making rested with landholding families and village councils rather than formal state mechanisms, placing customary ownership and consent at the centre of resistance. Opposition drew strength from Khasi matrilineal land practices, local democratic institutions, and student organisations that treated mining as a question of collective authority rather than individual compensation. Over time, the movement also became a reference point in national conversations about how extractive projects bypass public consultation, particularly in regions governed by special constitutional provisions, and how environmental risk is unevenly distributed across peripheral geographies.
Tarun Bhartiya died of a heart attack on 27 January 2025 at the age of 54. His funeral in Shillong drew filmmakers, photographers, activists, writers, students, and local organisers, many of whom had worked with him across different moments of his career. Several tributes described him as a teacher in practice, someone who shaped younger filmmakers and photographers through conversation, collaboration, and example. His presence in Shillong and his long-term commitment to working from the Northeast mattered to many who saw his career as proof that serious documentary and political work did not need to be routed through metropolitan centres to have national and international relevance.
Bhartiya’s legacy sits in the way his work combined rigorous political thinking with direct, grounded engagement. He read deeply, followed political theory, and thought carefully about history, land, labour, and power, yet his work never stayed at the level of abstraction. His films and photographs emerged from extended interaction with people involved in struggles over mining, faith, displacement, and state violence. He treated documentation as a form of responsibility, producing material that could be returned to movements, shared among communities, and used by researchers and organisers over time. This approach made his body of work an important reference point for artists and scholars working on visual cultures of resistance in India, particularly those interested in how images circulate within movements.
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