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In the early hours of 3 December 1984, the photographer Raghu Rai was woken by a phone call from his editor at India Today alerting him to a catastrophic gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. Thousands had been killed in what would become known as the world’s worst industrial disaster.

Rai took the first flight out of Delhi, arriving that morning to a city overwhelmed by death. He later recalled struggling to capture the scale of the disaster, and yet one photograph – a close-up of an unknown girl’s face, eyes open and swollen as she was covered with earth for burial – came to symbolise the tragedy.

Rai, who has died aged 83 of cancer, was adept at distilling such events into singular, enduring images. He chronicled India’s often turbulent post-independence history, documenting not only political upheaval but the rhythms of everyday life. Rai brought a distinctly Indian perspective to photographing his homeland – his lifelong obsession – and his work was rooted in a belief that the country could only be photographed from within, through a lived understanding of its contradictions.

He had a rare ability to translate densely detailed scenes into coherent compositions, avoiding the cliches often associated with outsider views of the subcontinent. “India is a multireligious, multicultural ancient civilisation with a varied landscape, from the Himalayas to deserts to backwaters,” he wrote in 2017, on the occasion of the country’s 70th anniversary, “so the experience of an image has to be multilayered, too.”

Over a career spanning six decades, Rai photographed political upheaval, religious ritual, urban expansion and rural continuity, producing a body of work that resisted simplification. He covered the Bangladesh war of independence of 1971 and its aftermath, for which he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian awards.

He was given sustained access to political and spiritual figures including Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Sadhguru (Jaggi Vasudev), often photographing them over months and years. His images were widely published in international newspapers and magazines, and in more than 50 books, including Raghu Rai’s India (2001) and monographs on Calcutta, the Sikh community and Indian classical musicians.

Born in Jhang, British India (now in Pakistan), Rai was the youngest of four siblings. His family moved to Delhi after partition in 1947, and he followed his father into civil engineering before a chance encounter with a donkey changed the course of his life. Accompanying his elder brother, the photojournalist S Paul, he became fixated on a stray donkey caught in a shaft of light and spent hours trying to frame it. The resulting photograph, made with a borrowed camera, was later published in the Times in London. Rai described the experience as his first sense of “the magic of holding a moment”.

Encouraged by his brother, he left government service to pursue photography, joining the Statesman newspaper in 1965 as a staff photographer. He worked there for a decade, developing a fluency for responding to unfolding events while beginning to extend his attention beyond the immediate assignment.

In 1972 his photographs were exhibited in Paris at the Galerie Delpire, where they were seen by Henri Cartier-Bresson, co-founder of Magnum Photos, who invited him to join the agency. Rai later admitted that it was not until five years later that he dared to reply, joining Magnum in 1977 and remaining with them until his death.

By then he had begun to move into editorial roles, working first for the news weekly Sunday, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), before joining India Today in 1980 as a photographer and picture editor. There he helped define the magazine’s visual identity at a formative moment for Indian journalism, bringing a more expansive, essayistic approach to news photography. His use of extended picture essays, then relatively uncommon in the Indian press, allowed for a more sustained and nuanced engagement with events.

Rai’s reputation as a photographer was built on this ability to move between the immediate shock of events and a more sustained, layered observation of a country in motion. He returned to Bhopal repeatedly, including in 2001 on assignment for Greenpeace to document the long-term effects of the disaster, which led to the book Exposure: Portrait of a Corporate Crime (2002) and an exhibition that toured internationally.

In 2009 he was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture, and in 2017 received a lifetime achievement award from the Indian government. The same year, his daughter, Avani Rai, a photographer and film-maker, made the documentary Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait following a trip with him to Kashmir.

In 2010 he told the Guardian that he had moved beyond daily news photography in search of images that would endure. “We have a beautiful word in Hindi, darshan,” he said. “Literally, it means ‘seeing’, but it’s more seeing in totality, seeing the connections between things. Photography for me is a darshan of my country.”

He is survived by his second wife, the architect Gurmeet Sangha Rai, and their children, Avani and Purvai, and by two children, Nitin and Lagan, from his first marriage, to the journalist Usha Rai, which ended in divorce.

• Raghu Rai, photographer, born 18 December 1942; died 26 April 2026