Life between Light and Shade

When Aditi Rao Hydari got a call to be in the 2027 Pirelli Calendar, she thought it was a prank. As an actor, she has realised many of her dreams—working with some of India’s most hallowed filmmakers from Mani Ratnam to Sanjay Leela Bhansali. She has featured on magazine covers and walked the red carpet at Cannes Film Festival for several years. Yet, the thought of being a calendar girl—least of all, a Pirelli Calendar girl—never crossed her mind. “This was not a dream I dreamt,” she says, pointing to the plush red art publication resting in front of her—the first glimpse of the Pirelli Calendar for next year. The call had not been a prank; dressed in white and blanketed in flowers, Hydari is among a host of other well-known Indian faces photographed by Sølve Sundsbø for the calendar. “There’s only a select few people who get the Pirelli calendar. And there are a few chosen ones who get to be in the calendar,” she says, adding that it is a “pinch-me moment”.

There is perhaps no calendar more globally renowned than Pirelli’s annual offering which began as a marketing strategy for the tyre manufacturer. Many businesses made calendars too but Derek Forsyth—who helmed advertising and publicity at Pirelli’s UK office—proposed an artistic version and the team commissioned English photographer Robert Freeman to create the first edition of The Cal, a trademarked name for the calendar. Over the decades, 43 photographers have worked on the calendar, including acclaimed names such as Arthur Elgort, Steve McCurry, Terence Donovan, Bruce Weber, Nick Knight and Peter Lindbergh. The faces featured in the calendar have been equally zeitgeist-defining—think Catherine Deneuve and Isabella Rossellini, Christy Turlington and Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and Kristen Stewart. At different times, the calendar has tried to reflect evolving cultural sensibilities—the first Calendar dedicated to Black beauty came in 1987 and the 2008 edition was shot entirely in Asia. Over the past decade, with changing notions of aesthetics, the Calendar—which had been known for its nude photography and emphasis on the body—has also turned to other themes and ideas in collaboration with its image-makers.

Now, in its 53rd edition, the Pirelli Calendar is dedicated to India—and was launched at an event in New Delhi on October 23. It is The Cal’s maiden outing in India; in another first, two photographers have undertaken the project together. Or, in fact three photographers. Sølve Sundsbø, the London-based Norwegian photographer who also created the 2026 Pirelli Calendar was originally commissioned with Raghu Rai to create the new edition. The intention had been for Sundsbø to create the fashion imagery while Rai—known for an oeuvre that travelled from villages and streets to India’s high est corridors of power—would juxtapose it with his images. Following his death this April, Rai’s daughter Avani, a photographer and artist, stepped in to complete his work.

The result is a sprawling portfolio of photographs evoking India’s varied vocabularies of style. Sundsbø photographed nine women, from India or of Indian heritage, between Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur and Ajabgarh, situating them in colours, light, an abundance of flowers and seasonal festivities. These references are commonplace to India and used abundantly in visual storytelling about the country. But the photographer is not worried about the possibility of clichés. “When I started thinking about this whole project, it was literally about what do I see when I close my eyes and think of India,” he says. “I have not been scared of embracing those things.” It is hard to argue that the images are not clichéd but they are beautifully executed.

With first Raghu Rai, and then Avani working on parallel and being more suited to capturing what he describes as “the essence of India”, Sundsbø concentrated on the women who served as protagonists in his photographs. “I wanted people to be joyful and confident in front of the camera,” he says. “Everything else is a backdrop—a tool or a prop for the person. It’s all about the person.” His subjects are well-known faces, from Hydari to model Lakshmi Menon drenched in the colours of Holi. Musician Anoushka Shankar’s photograph evokes monsoons while television personality and producer Padma Lakshmi floats in a pool of water. Sundsbø also paid special attention to light, which he found to be different in India—warmer, and in a different conversation with local architecture and terrains. Light has main-character energy in the photographs of poet and performer Rupi Kaur, model Bhavitha Mandava as well as actors Avantika Vandanapu and Freida Pinto.

Dressed in a deep pink chiffon dress for her photograph, Pinto looks at one with the bougainvillea flowers that droop over her. In Delhi for the launch (along with Hydari, Mandava and Padma Lakshmi), Pinto—due to appear in Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth—noted that her outfit made her think of the chiffon saris actors have often worn in Hindi movies. “We have a long tradition of beauty, appreciation of textiles and women enjoying the act of dressing up,” she says. “To see that, along with everyday life, the pictures of the streets—it’s not something you’d see side by side. What this calendar’s basically saying is that both exist in India at the same time. One can’t stand without the other.”

Avani Rai is both photographer and model in The Cal. She is one of the nine women photographed by Sundsbø—her bright yellow ensemble offsetting a quiet, sombre expression. Her work as a photographer on the project happened in the wake of her father’s death, and is tinged with a mix of emotions. For Avani, her father was her first audience and Pirelli’s offer seemed akin to a gift from him—to stop the mourning and sadness. The photographs then became an exercise in pursuing and documenting joy—set between Old Delhi and Mumbai, in markets, streets, rooftops and cafes. While her father intended to shoot in a studio, Avani has situated her images outdoors often revisiting places and people he had photographed. Sikh men holding bright red balloons, transwomen all decked up and caught mid-laughter, a young crowd in a café—these are among more than 100 characters and protagonists populating her photographs. “Fashion in India is on the streets,” Avani observes.

A number of the photographs feature Rai’s archival works in the background as if in conversation with his daughter’s frames. Take Ranveer Singh for instance, who stands on a Mumbai rooftop showering confetti. In the backdrop, Avani chose a photograph her father took in an industrial factory. The photograph is filled with sparks and it reminded her of the film industry and its stardom. Singh is the most famous of Avani’s subjects and she deliberately included cinema in the conversation, but the Bollywood star is eventually just one of her many characters that make up India. “Everyone is important. You can shoot Gen Z, artisans or my mother [Gurmeet Rai, who features in the calendar and was often the subject of Raghu Rai’s images too],” Avani says. “The calendar equalises everybody.”

India was Raghu Rai’s lifelong project—a nation of a billion moods and stories, and centuries of multicultural histories casting long shadows on the present. Even a calendar of The Cal’s scale and scope is inadequate to capture this expansive spirit. That Pirelli chose India as its theme, spotlighting faces and lives connected to it is certainly a statement of India’s rising cultural influence on the globe. But the Pirelli Calendar is, as it has always been, a photographer’s story to tell. The 2027 edition is Avani Rai’s love letter to her father and the country they have both called home. And for Sølve Sundsbø, it is his first tryst with India. He promises to be back.