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Of those four great masters, Shirdi Sai Baba, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramana Maharshi, only the latter, in the last years of his physical, corporeal existence, was filmed a few times by disciples, apart from the several well-known photographic portraits that represent him in so many hearts and minds. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who founded “Magnum”, was given to fulfill an extraordinarily significant function in terms of recording great figures of India’s destiny: he met and photographed Mahatma Gandhi just before he was assassinated and was thus able to also record the collective emotional outpour at his funerals; soon after that he made a first visit to Sri Ramana Maharshi’s ashram where he was allowed to take several pictures of the sage; and he happened to return there in April 1950 just as the sage was living his last days, afflicted by cancer, and left his body and he was also able to capture the lasting images of the funerals. And it was very soon afterwards that he reached Pondicherry, where the Mother allowed him to take pictures of Her and of Sri Aurobindo as well, the very first pictures to be taken of either of Them since 1920 – and the only photographs we have of Sri Aurobindo in His rooms, just a few months before he too passed away.

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