‘Long before we named the gods, we painted animals’: There’s a new book of Raghu Rai’s animal photos

I have known Raghu Rai for more than half a century. Throughout this time, I have followed his work closely and have been privileged to witness in it his remarkable ability to see what most of us tend to miss. The prowess to take himself seriously and trust his eyes, his sense of humour and the enormous empathy for his subjects – all of these qualities show up in so many of his photographs. But perhaps, they are realised most poignantly in his vast archives of images of animals he has met and lensed during his travels across the country. When I looked through these evocative images, it became clear to me instantly that we had to make them accessible to the world. Each one was a statement.

Each one, a lesson. That is when, and how, this book came to be. There is an invisible, ancient thread running through our collective human consciousness – a golden tether that binds us not only to the earth, but to all that crawls, soars, prowls and sings upon it. It winds through the echo of hoofbeats in cave chambers, the inked silhouettes on parchment scrolls, the whispered lullabies of grandmothers speaking of tigers and...

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