India as seen by Frenchmen

India and France have organised an exhibition of photos by Alain Danielou.

Chittagong: India and France have collaborated to organise an exhibition in Bangladesh of photos taken by French lensmen Alain Danielou and Raymond Burnier, who stayed at Shantiniketan in West Bengal at the invitation of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The duo travelled by road from France to Afghanistan and made India their home between the late 1930s and 1950s, snapping landscapes, various community rituals and ancient cave culture, among other places, at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh.

`India through the lenses of Alain Danielou & Raymond Burnier` has been jointly organised by the Indian High Commission and the Alliance Francaise. Opening the two-week long exhibition, Assistant Indian High Commissioner Subrata Bhattacharjee said the duo contributed immensely to the awareness of Indian culture and history in the western world. Many Europeans and Americans got their first glimpse of India through their photographs while the pictures they took during their trips to different Indian temples made those famous, he was quoted as saying by The Daily Star Tuesday. Samuel Berthet, director of Alliance Fran?se in Chittagong, said the remarkable work of Danielou and Burnier - creating an artistic inventory of the motifs and sculptures found on ancient Indian temples - is an invaluable heritage for the aesthetic and semantic appreciation of the civilisation of the subcontinent. IANS