Communities of Image-Making: On Sayeeda Khanam and Photojournalism

Sayeeda Khanam was introduced to photography by her aunt, Mahmuda Khatun Siddiqua, a poet and artist who was awarded the Ekushey Padak—introduced in memory of the martyrs of the Language Movement of 1952—in 1977 by the government of Bangladesh. It goes to show how far Khanam’s aesthetic was shaped by literary ideas and movements that animated political and social life in the twentieth-century. One of the early photographs she took, in fact, was that of a “Kabuliwala” in Kolkata, inspired by the eponymous story by Rabindranath Tagore. Ranging freely across the cultures of Bengal and South Asia—her work, primarily as a photojournalist, was shaped by the patronage of a diverse array of film magazines, journals and illustrated weeklies. These included the likes of Begum—where she got her start—as well as Chitrali, Pakistan Observer, Dainik Bangla, Dainik Purbadesh, Sangbad, Ittefaq and Pakistan Khobor.

A magazine like Begum, with which Khanam was associated for over fifty years, should be seen as a spiraling index into the world of female, predominantly Muslim literary giants in Bengali—like Sufia Kamal, its first editor (who, in her turn, chose Begum Rokeya’s portrait to go on the cover of the first issue), Shamsunnahar Mahmud, Protibha Ganguly, Nurjahan Begum and later, figures like Selina Hossain and Dil Monowara Monu. Sayeeda Khanam may not have received any formal training in photography, but her cultural environment nurtured her vision and furnished the range of subjects that would become significant for her to photograph. It is in this heady context that the thrill of the present—along with the clear threat of danger—becomes comprehensible to us when she describes her close-shave with the retreating Pakistani army while she was taking photographs in December 1971: “We (she and her companions) hid ourselves behind a mango tree while the machine-gun bullets cut through the air right past our ears.”

Khanam also spent the years between 1974 and 1986 working as a librarian for the Bengali department in the University of Dhaka, after working as a nurse during Bangladesh’s Liberation Struggle. Following her death in August 2020, she was the subject of an exhibition at this year’s Chobi Mela (Bangladesh, 2021) which featured her photographs as a conspectus on her life. Titled The Rebel with a Smile, it was curated by Sarker Protick, Tanzim Wahab and ASM Rezaur Rahman. The exhibition foregrounds her role as a “trailblazer” for subsequent generations of female journalists, a view that Khanam would have shared partially when she spoke about being the only female photographer on official assignments. “I was the only (Bengali) woman in a simple blue sari with a camera in hand, amongst the hundred other fellow male journalists,” she once said, describing her work when Queen Elizabeth II visited Bangladesh. But in order to recover the motivations that guided her aesthetic choices—from the startling images of female liberation warriors in East Pakistan, that is probably her most famous work, to the informal portraits she took of artists like Kanika Bandopadhyay, Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen and Satyajit Ray—one has to attend to the intellectual curiosity, leisure activities and political commitments of several writers and reformers that was on weekly display in little magazines like Begum.