50 glorious years of Border Security Force
BSF@50 is regarded as one of the finest campaigns ever shot on any of the paramilitary/ military forces in the country. India's first line of defense, Border Security Force, completes 50 years this year. The calendar was launched earlier this year and also a book titled BORDERMAN by the home minister Raj Nath Singh. It fills my heart with pride to be able to capture a part of their glory.
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| Border Security Force personnel during an intense training exercise. Photograph: Pravin Talan |
Beyond the Barbed Wire
A border is much more than a line separating two countries. It is also the point through which a threat can enter — militants and terrorists, arms and narcotics, smugglers and human traffickers. In peacetime, along the international borders entrusted to it, the Border Security Force is India's first line of defence: watching, patrolling and preventing that invisible line on a map from being breached.
But the threat at India's borders does not always carry a weapon. Sometimes it is a virus or bacteria. Sometimes it is extreme cold or unbearable heat. In forests and riverine borders, danger can come from the terrain itself — disease, isolation, wild animals or predators in the water. The men and women serving there have to survive the environment even as they remain alert to the human threat around the border.
When I began researching the BSF before taking up this assignment, I realised that simply photographing jawans in uniform against barbed wire would tell very little of this story.
I wanted to photograph what it actually means to guard a border.
Could I look beneath the uniform and the obvious symbols of border security and visually communicate the larger reality — the terrain they live in, the threats they watch for, the conditions they endure, the communities around them and the constant state of preparedness their job demands?
That became the challenge I set for myself: could my photographs make someone sitting hundreds or thousands of kilometres away understand, even briefly, what being a border guarding force actually means?
When I reached Simna in Tripura, two BSF personnel had been ambushed and killed in the area not long before. The remoteness I had come to photograph was not merely picturesque. These were operational environments where danger was real. For a photographer, the opportunity to work inside such demanding environments made the assignment even more compelling.
The journey took me from the freezing winter fog of the Punjab border to remote posts in the Northeast and eventually the waters of the Sundarbans, documenting the Border Security Force as it approached its 50th anniversary. There would be horses and boats, tunnels and explosions, border villages and mosquitoes, forests and waterways — and landscapes so beautiful that they sometimes concealed the dangers within them.
There is no single visual definition of India's border. That was the story I wanted to photograph.
A Winter Morning at Wagah-Attari
Some of my strongest memories of photographing the BSF are not of dramatic action at all. One is of being out around 4 in the morning at Wagah-Attari, in winter temperatures touching 2°C, waiting for mounted BSF personnel to emerge through the mist.
The cold, fog and near silence transformed a place that millions of Indians associate with crowds, ceremony and patriotic fervour. There was none of that at this hour. Just horses, men, fencing and a landscape slowly appearing with the morning light.
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| Mounted BSF personnel emerge through the winter mist at Wagah-Attari border. Photograph: Pravin Talan |
Photography often means being somewhere at an hour when there appears to be nothing to photograph — and waiting until there is.
Finding the Photograph Inside the Training
The assignment also gave me access to training situations that could produce photographs far removed from conventional pictures of men posing with weapons.
One of my favourites remains a training photograph inside a narrow tunnel. There is something almost surreal about the image. The human figure becomes small against the enormous dark circular structure, moving into a space that seems to swallow everything around him.
I have always been interested in that transformation — when a photograph of a real operational or training situation stops being merely documentary and acquires another visual life.
The answer was never to stage the force into imaginary situations. It was to find the photograph inside what they genuinely do.
When you are close to an exercise involving explosions, there is very little time to admire what is happening. You anticipate where the movement might happen, choose your position and stay with it. The explosion is over before you have had time to think about the explosion.
The Border Is Also Somebody's Home
Spend enough time along India's borders and another reality becomes obvious. The border is not merely where armed personnel stand guard. People live there. Children grow up there. Villages continue with everyday life beside fencing and checkposts that the rest of us mostly encounter in news photographs.
The relationship between the BSF and communities living along the border therefore became an important part of what I wanted to document. For those communities, the uniform is not an abstraction. The personnel are part of the landscape of everyday life.
The Northeast: The Visible Enemy and the Invisible One
The Northeast changed my understanding of the assignment. From the air and on the ground, some BSF locations seemed almost impossibly isolated.
Looking down at an outpost surrounded by vast stretches of landscape gives you a perspective that maps never quite provide. Someone has to reach these places. Someone has to serve there. And someone remains there after the visitor with the camera has gone home.
At Simna II, another enemy became visible precisely because it was normally invisible: mosquitoes. In some parts of the Northeast, mosquito-borne illness can itself be a serious threat, and protection becomes part of daily survival.
It brought home something important. The enemy is not always the person you can see. It can be disease. It can be weather. It can be terrain. It can simply be isolation.
At places such as Tera Gharia, the border itself could become almost surreal — everyday life, homes and waterways existing immediately around an international boundary. By then I had stopped thinking of the assignment simply as photographing a force. I was also photographing a geography, and the BSF was taking me into an India I had never seen before.
Women Guarding India's Borders
The presence of women in the force was another part of the BSF story I wanted to photograph without turning it into a separate, softened visual language. They were part of the working strength of the force, and that is how I wanted them to appear.
One of the photographs was created along the fencing at Wagah-Attari. There is nothing performative about it. The fencing dominates the landscape and she belongs naturally within it.
The other photograph was far more confrontational visually. I went extremely close. The launcher almost takes over the frame, while her face remains composed behind it. Both photographs became particularly popular.
For me there was a simple principle behind these photographs. Women in uniform did not need to be visually softened because they were women. If her role involved patrolling an international border or handling a weapon, that was the reality worth photographing.
Danger Lies in Its Beauty
And then came the Sundarbans.
Few places I have photographed illustrate the contradictions of border duty quite like it. The landscape can be breathtakingly beautiful. Water stretches towards the horizon and a patrol boat becomes a tiny silhouette against the sky. At sunrise or sunset it can appear almost idyllic.
But the beauty is deceptive. These are difficult waters, with tidal channels, isolation, predators in the water and forests, and the constant operational reality of guarding a riverine international border.
During the assignment I experienced a little of that unpredictability myself when our speedboat was stranded. Suddenly the beautiful landscape around you feels rather different. For the BSF personnel accompanying me, however, this was not an adventure. It was their workplace.
When I selected 25 photographs for a small exhibition as part of BSF@50, one thought kept returning as I looked through the pictures.
Danger Lies in Its Beauty.
It became the title of the exhibition. Because by then I understood that the phrase applied to much more than the Sundarbans. A beautiful landscape can conceal an unforgiving posting. A tranquil river can be an international border. A mist-covered landscape can be under constant watch. And behind all that beauty is somebody doing the watching.
From Photographs to Borderman
By the end of the journey I had built a visual record much larger than a collection of photographs of personnel carrying weapons. There were horses, boats, border villages, women on patrol, training grounds, remote outposts, forests and waterways — and the hundreds of small moments of travelling, waiting and watching that make the dramatic photographs possible.
The photographs were used extensively through the BSF's 50th anniversary year and were brought together in a special edition coffee-table book, Borderman — Stories from the Keepers of Peace
For me, seeing the work take this form was particularly satisfying. I had started with a question — whether photographs could go beyond the familiar image of a jawan and barbed wire and communicate something of what guarding India's borders actually means. The book was one answer to that question.
When the Photographs Travel
The photographs also travelled through BSF publications, exhibitions, media and public communication. That was important to me because a photograph created in a remote border area could now introduce that world to people who might never physically reach it.
In May 2015, Rediff.com published a substantial photo feature, “BSF@50: A Lensman’s Tribute to the Borderman”, presenting this body of work to a wider audience.
For me, the most satisfying part of the assignment is that the photographs do not show only what the BSF looks like. Together they show something of what the force actually is — trained to fight, disciplined to guard, human enough to become part of the lives around the border, and resilient enough to work in places where the environment itself can become an adversary.
And through this story, I also had the privilege of photographing another subject I never tire of:
India itself.
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