Jacqueline Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru, Delhi (1962). Photo courtesy Kulwant Roy Collections/Aditya Arya Archives

Thousands of never-before-seen photographs of 20th century India, including images of Jacqueline Kennedy and Gandhi, have been unearthed by an inheritor after spending years in large yellow crates.

For nearly five decades, photojournalist Kulwant Roy chronicled the birth of a new, free India during and after the country’s struggle for freedom. Roy managed to gain access to the inner circles of important figures such as Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, capturing powerful, intimate images of some of the century’s most influential people.

Throughout his career Roy sold many of his photos to news agencies, but tragically many of them were lost later in his life. Among the missing images was an iconic shot of Gandhi arguing with an Indian politician, as well as photographs of American first lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to India.

“Roy had mailed the pictures to his address in Delhi, but they did not reach. Broken in spirit, he spent the last years of his life scouting post offices and hunting for boxes in garbage dumps of Delhi, placing ads in newspapers with rewards, and quit all his foreign assignments,” said Adita Arya, a fellow photographer who inherited the images when Roy died in 1984 and has spent the last two years restoring and annotating them.

Now, finally unearthed and open to the public, 500 of the black-and-white photographs are being featured in a new book called “History in the Making: The Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy.” The images are also at the center of a new exhibit at the Nehru Center in London, running now through June 4th.