The Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado is supposed to have said that a picture that does not ennoble the subject or reveal deep human or natural beauty, lacks purpose and should not have been taken. I’m not sure if that is necessarily always true, yet I am reminded of it as I reflect on Tarun Bhartiya’s photographs. His images have that exalting quality that elevate the people and places he is engaged with and seeks to portrait. They convey that life is real, that it matters. Human dignity is not a given, but something that can only be achieved through sustained efforts. It is a struggle and a commitment that, I like to think, defines Tarun’s work.Tarun BhartiyaEm/No/NahiYaarbal Books, 2025As researcher working in Northeast India, my paths have often crossed with Tarun’s. He was the person to consult for images for an article, book cover, film project or updates and friendly adda about the goings-on in the region. During one of our last meetings, we discussed the anti-uranium movement in Domiasiat in Meghalaya and the particular role played by late Kong Spillity Lyngdoh Langrin. Tarun had followed the movement for almost two decades and had become close friends with matriarch Kong Spillity and her family. Kong Spillity’s refusal to accept monetary compensation to allow mining on her lands and her persistent “em” (no) to every offer by the uranium mining corporation is a remarkable story of subaltern resistance. How could it be that an old and frail woman managed to prevent the Indian industrial-military complex from laying hands on a strategic mineral?Tarun wanted to tell the story, but struggled with how to best do it. A fatal heart attack ended his life. Death, so sudden and uncompromising. Through a collective effort by friends and his wife Angela Rangad, this project could eventually be realised posthumously. Tarun’s first photobook poignantly entitled Em/No/Nahi was released in late 2025, published in a superb manner by Yaarbal Books. A true labour of love.Black cover, with white letters on a coarse, matte paper. The book has an impeccable design and layout of both images and texts. The size is smaller than the usual photobook, only about 15×20 cm (or A5 size). This not only makes the book to stand out, but the format works surprisingly well with the photographs. The book contains 72 black-and-white images, and one small colour image. Two of the images can be opened up; they unfold into panoramic photographs.The book begins with a series of images of Kong Spillity’s funeral in 2020; Death House. Waiting, sealing the coffin, flowers, cross, funeral procession, preparing a slaughtered pig. This is followed by a series of images from the Domiasiat village, taken in 2006. One is the iconic image of Kong Spillity standing outside her house. This, I believe, is when she explained to Tarun, “Could the money buy this river? This land? This freedom?” – words that have become the rallying cry for many young people who have come in support of the cause to keep the uranium in the ground, come what may. For the young, protests involve more direct actions like rallies and road blockades.Kong Spility Lyngdoh Langrin, Matriarch who said No. Photo: Tarun BhartiyaThe book then takes us to another struggle in the Khasi Hills, protests against the damming of river Umngot. “Your sacredness will be stripped from you. The rice fields with their huts. The waters will come and drown. Where do we run? What do we eat?” (lyrics by S.F. Mylliemngap, page 139).View from a police jeep. Photo: Tarun BhartiyaThe book also contains images of everyday life. The happy movements. A wedding, a father with his children, a well-deserved lunch break in the jhum fields. The images that strike a chord in me are nevertheless those of the landscape. The Khasi Hills have a rugged sublime beauty to them, something that Tarun’s photographs capture in a wonderful manner. It is a landscape formed by people’s livelihoods. Not undisturbed nature but lived, and sometimes damaged, environments. Survival can be hard. In some places, too many trees have been felled, leaving the soil exposed and barren.Road to Uranium country. Photo: Tarun BhartiyaWhat is in people’s “No”? What is it that they are defending and what kind of futures are they envisioning or hoping for? These are fundamental questions. While there are no easy answers, Tarun’s Em is grounded in deep attachments to the land. Not as property, but as entangled relations and joint flourishing, “dreams of commons lived”. In the afterword, Angela Rangad quotes one of Tarun’s Facebook updates, “What else is resistance but defending what you love?” Tarun believed in collective action and it is perhaps his fate that the photobook became a joint achievement. I would like to end by applauding all those that contributed to this wonderful book. Perhaps, this success might inspire further adventures into Tarun’s archive of images, films and writings.Bengt G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (Routledge, 2000), Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast (Berghahn Book, 2011) and Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-authored with Dolly Kikon).