In the middle of a lake in Rajasthan, Avani Rai played the muse for the camera. Around her, the machinery of a fashion image whirred: the waiting, the positioning, the attention to light. But there was something unusually charged about watching her be photographed. Rai was not only a subject in the Pirelli Calendar 2027. She was also one of the eyes behind it, stepping into the project her father, the late Raghu Rai, had been developing with Pirelli.
For those outside fashion’s inner sanctum, the Pirelli Calendar can sound improbable at first: an annual calendar published by an Italian tyre company that became one of photography’s most coveted cultural objects. Born in 1964 as a project by Pirelli UK, ‘The Cal’ went on to be shot by some of the most recognised photographers of their time, evolving from a corporate gift into a glossy barometer of beauty, glamour and image-making. From 1964 to 2026, 52 calendars have been realised by 41 photographers.
For the 2027 edition, India is the protagonist. Pirelli announced that the Calendar would focus on the country through the work of Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø and Indian master Raghu Rai, with Avani Rai stepping in to realise her father’s intentions after his death.
The cast gathers a cross-section of Indian women whose public lives span cinema, music, poetry, food, fashion and photography: Freida Pinto, Anoushka Shankar, Padma Lakshmi, Lakshmi Menon, Bhavitha Mandava, Avantika Vandanapu, Avani Rai, Rupi Kaur and Aditi Rao Hydari. In Sundsbø’s frame, they became portraits of Indian presence in global culture; in Avani’s, they sit in the midst of the everyday lives that formed the grammar of Raghu Rai’s India. Raghu Rai did not photograph India as scenery. Across six decades, he documented the country’s political upheavals and defining tragedies, from the Bangladesh war of independence to the Bhopal gas tragedy. His work resisted the postcard version of India, insisting instead on density and contradiction.
Avani’s task, then, was never simply to complete an assignment. It was to enter a gaze without being consumed by it. The original idea, she explains, was called “past forward”: Raghu’s unpublished images from the past 30, 40, even 60 years would become the backdrop, while contemporary India would live in front of them. “I cannot shoot like him,” she says. “Because to shoot like him, I have to be him, which I’m not.” Instead, she took his frames into the streets of Old Delhi. “I stood behind my father, behind his frame,” she says, describing how she juxtaposed 2026 with his images and reframed them through her own eye. It’s a beautiful metaphor for inheritance: not imitation, not preservation, but standing close enough to continue the conversation.
At Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur, in the sharp heat of a May afternoon, Bhavitha Mandava posed in a shimmering gold dress against stone and sun. Sundsbø and his team waited for the light to lower, adjusting the frame until the image was perfect. “You sort of try to control the environment and then surrender and see what happens,” Sundsbø says of his process. Elsewhere, Padma Lakshmi lay half-submerged in a pool for nearly 40 minutes, flowers and lotus floating around her. “I’ve been waiting to do this kind of photo shoot my whole life,” she says. For Lakshmi, who has spent much of her career negotiating visibility as a model, writer, host and cultural narrator, the significance of the shoot also lies in how India enters a global image archive. “I hope that with this shoot, some of the exoticism that India and its image in the West suffers from is diminished,” she says. “The Indian face is such a classical face. It’s such a beautiful face.”
