Recently I read Nirad Chaudhuri’s classic “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian” and its sequel, “Thy Hand, Great Anarch!” After 1,500 pages of Chaudhuri’s detailed excursuses on family, Bengali religion and literature, and his insider’s take on the key figures of the Indian independence movement (Mahatma Gandhi has an entourage to assist him being humble), I know India well enough to identify the equestrian figure in Raghubir Singh’s “Subhas Chandra Bose statue, Calcutta, West Bengal” (1986), one of the photographs in his “Retrospective” at Sepia International.

Subhas Chandra Bose, like the subjects of most public statuary, is someone who was once important, or almost important, a player in the jockeying for position in the years before Britain left the Indians to their own devices. If you’ve read Chaudhuri, it doesn’t seem so odd that this nationalist personage is wearing what looks like a Western military uniform and is represented in a classically Western style. Or that the statue is third-rate and no one in the photograph is paying any attention to it.

Singh, the photographer, sees it. The statue is shown isolated through the window of an open door. The door, probably to a small shop, is made of wood and painted a deep hunter green. The rich green contrasts with the muddy browns of the statue and the buildings seen outside the frame of the window. Anonymous Indians scurry busily through a square dominated by large billboards that advertise “A golden opportunity for UBI depositors!” and other slogans. Chaudhuri would have recognized this scene, its cultural confusion and quiet pathos, and smiled wryly.

Chaudhuri also would be pleased that the cover photograph on the latest reissue of his great “Autobiography” is a detail from “Man Diving and Swimmers, Banaras” (1985) by Raghubir Singh. The two have much in common: their privileged backgrounds, their curiosity about their endlessly diverse country, their ability to make its complexities – the ways it is both culturally rooted and unmoored – comprehensible to outsiders. They both left India to live elsewhere: Chaudhuri in England, Singh in France and eventually the United States.

Singh said, “The eyes of India only see in color,” and his photography is entirely in color; “Kodachrome,” with its stained-glass brilliance, was his favorite film. He used two color registers: the first, muted earth tones – tans and browns – and vegetal greens; the second, a folk palette of exquisite vulgarity. He doesn’t insist you like it but presents it as a given, without which there is no realizing India. “After an accident, Grand Truck Road, Bihar” (1991) brings these two realms of color into powerful juxtaposition.

The left side of the picture looks down on an idyllic rural landscape of pale browns and greens. There are fields and irrigation ponds, farmers and cattle, a few trees and a mountain seen hazily in the distance. The right foreground is entirely taken up by the hood and cab of a big, overturned truck. Although the top of the cab is decorated with elaborate Indian calligraphy, the truck’s most distinctive feature is its red color. It is a red ordinarily used in the West only to paint fanciful wooden toys, a red even a child incapable of language will respond to.

“On Vivekananda rock, Kanya Kumari, Tamil Nadu” (1993) also uses both color registers and a dramatic composition. The background is a large expanse of water with pale shades of blue in the sea and sky. In the middle of the picture, black rocks project above the surface and turn the water beating on them white. Below the rocks, in the middle foreground, is the top of an elderly Indian woman’s head, seen from about the bridge of the nose up. A light blue shawl with white and purple embroidery and a thin red strip around its edge frames her white hair and dark brown fore head and eyes; the red caste mark narrows the possible sites of this picture to a specifically Indian locale. The image implies that the sea and Indian culture both partake of eternity.

Raghubir Singh was comfortable in several of India’s great cities. “A taxi driver, Calcutta, West Bengal” (1987) is a complex urban encounter on a street that seems too crowded for traffic to actually move. The center of the picture is the brown face of a young taxi driver sitting in his pale yellow taxi. He has black hair, eyebrows, moustaches and eyes, and a stunned expression; someone has grabbed the arm he’s stuck out the window. To the right is the robin’s egg blue helmet of a man on a red scooter. To the left are painted purple flowers and a broken red light. Something dramatic but ordinary is going on in the midst of the shops and pedestrians and machines of this ancient city.

One of Chaudhuri’s main themes was the withdrawal of the British from an India that has seen many empires build and decay. Each successive civilization adds something, but there is a core that resists change. It is a long, long view rooted in the cosmic nature of Indian philosophy. Singh, too, has a feel for this. One of his main compositional devices is to include an automotive vehicle of some sort, a car or truck or bus, as a token of the imposition of Western technology and industrialization, and set it against an India where so many people still get around by foot.

“Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu” (1995) is shot from inside a car. Through the open door and its window, we see pale sand and the blues of the sea and sky. Walking purposefully along the beach are two women in yellow and red saris and a man in a patterned dhoti. The man is holding a bundle, possibly a child. All are barefoot. The three will still be walking on that beach long after the door is shut and the car has moved on.