With its population of 1.1 billion crammed into a land mass just one-third the size of the United States, India is a country that has proved difficult, if not impossible, for most western photographers to portray. Except for Henri Cartier-Bresson, who chronicled the period leading up to Indian independence in 1949, and Sebastiao Salgado, who photographed the country for both his "Workers" and "Migrations" series during the 1990s, not many names spring to mind. And these two masters offer a distinctly Western view of the country and its people that is often iconic and somewhat distanced.

New Yorkers have until Friday, May 16, to take in "The Home and the World," a gemlike exhibition of photographs by two of India's great photographers, Raghubir Singh and Dayanita Singh. Curated by Deepak Ananth, a Paris-based historian and critic, this show presents views of India as received from within.

Left: Trichur, Kerala, 1985, copyright Succession Raghubir Singh. Center and right: installation of work by Dyanita Singh, photos by Peggy Roalf.

For Raghubir Singh (1942 - 1999) India was a "River of Color," the title he gave to his retrospective, which was exhibited and published in 1999. And for Singh, his homeland was never too large to take in using a small hand-held camera. Born to an aristocratic family in Jaipur, whose fortunes were in decline due to the independence movement, he still had enough resources as a young man to take up photography.

An admirer of Cartier-Bresson, who he came to know, Singh captured moments in time on a human scale, but in the vibrant colors of the place. The photographs currently on display are from his travels through the subcontinent in which the ever-present Indian car, the Ambassador, is always part of the scene. The car frames or fractures views that alternate between majestic vistas and the mayhem of a crossroads in a place where many things always seem to be happening at once. These images are collected in the book "A Way Into India," recently reissued by Phaidon Press.

On the other side of the gallery is work in black and white by Dayanita Singh. Born in New Delhi in 1961, she studied at the International Center of Photography, then built a solid career as a photojournalist. In recent years, however, she began photographing the affluent world she came from, which is little known to the West.

These images, intimate in scale and visually complex, are a form of portraiture nearly devoid of people. They include interior spaces that range from her friends' homes and their belongings to museums, historical homes and palaces she has visited. Their hushed silence conveys the privacy of people both known and unknown to the photographer. In addition, selections from "A Letter Sent," a book made of seven accordion-folded booklets, each with 15 to 20 photographs is also on display. These were conceived as souvenirs for friends with whom she had traveled to the places depicted. The cloth covered wooden box that contains the folders conveys the personal touch of the artist.

Raghubir Singh and Dayanita Singh: The Home and the World is on view at The Gallery at Hermes, 691 Madison Avenue, through May 16.