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.
