India, April 26 -- India has lost one of its most consequential chroniclers. Raghu Rai, the photojournalist who spent six decades turning the streets, tragedies, and quiet intimacies of this country into permanent visual records, passed away at the age of 83, his family shared on his Instagram profile on Sunday.

Born on December 18, 1942, at Jhang in Punjab - now in Pakistan - Rai stumbled into photography almost accidentally, borrowing a camera from his elder brother S Paul in the 1960s. That accident became a career that would take him to Magnum Photos, to the front pages of Time, Life, and The New Yorker magazines, and to the heart of India's most defining moments - the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Bhopal gas tragedy, the quiet gran...