Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments, 1855–1920

This exhibition draws on the rich collection of early photographs of Indian monuments in the DAG archives to foreground photography’s powerful role in shaping our understanding of India’s history. It shows how photography helped to build the field sciences, by creating networks of information flow, and draws attention to the interconnected histories of politics, fieldwork, and the framing of academic disciplines, especially archaeology.

The photographs taken during the 1850s and 1860s represent the heady experimental years when a new technology was deployed in a terrain being surveyed for the first time. British India was the first country outside Europe to have professional photographic studios, and many early photographers of India were deemed outstanding by their contemporaries elsewhere. They followed and transformed pictorial conventions, emphasised contemporary tastes, introduced new artistic traditions and moulded the visual sensibilities of their varied audiences, from scholars to tourists. The photographs show histories in the making. While many of the works by leading British photographers of the time reveal a now well recognised colonial gaze, those by their Indian contemporaries point to previously little noticed interactions with that narrative.

Selected by guest curator Dr Sudeshna Guha, the material on display represents the many different objects that were created through photographic technology, such as paper and glass negatives; collotype, albumen, and silver gelatin prints; lavish albums that were gifted and collected as souvenirs; lithographs; stereographs; cartes-de-visite, and cabinet cards. In covering a chronological span stretching up to the first two decades of the twentieth century, the exhibition also showcases the earliest postcards of Indian monuments. They bring us to see the endowments of histories to places and things through stock images, and reflect, thereby, upon the notion and value of seeing and knowing.

EARLY ENCOUNTERS

When it was launched, photography was celebrated as the ‘pencil of nature’ that allowed ‘completeness of detail and correctness of perspective’. The promise of the new technology to capture ‘truths out there’ established the camera’s power to record ‘facts’, gather information and undertake surveillance. Photography’s supposed objectivity reinforced the value of ‘seeing the field’. Investigations of the past in the nineteenth century were strongly tied to antiquarian fascination with old world civilisations and to Western colonial intention. The field surveys of ancient India exemplify the connected histories of photography, archaeology and colonialism. They followed the revenue surveys of the East India Company and the assumptions of its gentlemen-scholars that the ancient texts of the natives were ‘a cloud of fables’. They were carefully aimed at demonstrating the British discovery of India’s real history. Daguerreotypes and calotypes of ancient ruins and art objects are among the first photographs made. The architectural photographs of Thomas Biggs, William Pigou, Andrew Neill, and Johnson and Henderson in the mid-1850s are among the earliest examples of the attempt to use photography systematically, for the historical survey of colonial terrains.

VISUAL INSCRIPTIONS

The early architectural photography of India often entailed ‘memory retrieval’ of the ‘key events in British colonialism’, and the photographs of Linnaeus Tripe and Felice Beato, two highly celebrated photographers in their own times, document aspects of this creative process. Tripe’s Madura series (1858) gained acclaim for its informational content and technical qualities. Yet the accompanying letterpresses, which reflected Tripe’s opinions, coaxed viewers to imagine through them the social, moral and political ‘advancements’ of the ostensibly enlightened and Christian governance of India by the British. The confluence of the caption and image direct attention to the ways in which data often emerged from the photographs.

Beato perfected the technique of creating photographic panoramas. They demanded high aesthetic skills, careful pivoting of the camera on a tripod, creating negatives quickly to ensure consistent intensity of light and uniform tone, and joining the trimmed prints in precise horizontal alignment. His sweeping views of Delhi and Lucknow convey continuity of time and a sense of narrative. But they are strikingly bereft of people and contrary to his intentions, provide a vantage point for seeing the brutality of the British reprisals that followed the 1857 Uprising. The unpeopled views of the cities show their ‘cleaning’, through ruthless killings of the residents, and forcible evacuations.

FIELD PHOTOGRAPHY

The photographs of Sanchi by James Waterhouse remind us of the remarkable achievements in the field, making negatives through the difficult wet collodion process, and albumenised papers, nitrate of silver and chloride of gold, with rare chemicals and scarce equipment. Rapid developments in photographic technology in the 1860s made field photography progressively easier.

Field photography aimed to show the ‘facts on the ground’. Those of John Burke, for example, include a scale, indicating the dimensions of the ruins. Yet even the best photographers were aware of the limitations of photographic scrutiny, as we see in the photograph of a temple at Rameswaram, with the colonnades of a long corridor highlighted in ink. It was taken and retouched by Edmund Lyon, a well-known commercial photographer, who was commissioned to photograph the monuments of Madras Presidency in 1867. The excellence of Lyon’s artistic touches was noted as the ‘hand of one who can control adverse circumstances’. The praise indicates that despite the promotion of field photography as an unmediated, documentary method, it was enmeshed within the complex nature of photographic creations.

SELLING THE PICTURESQUE

A matter of endless debate in the nineteenth century was whether to accord photographic images the status of art. The technical, optical, mechanical and chemical features associated with photography were widely accepted as being independent and free of the selective discrimination of the human eye and hand. However, a photographic image, like a painting, is an act of creation. The picturesque, the dominant visual aesthetic in landscape painting, was further developed through the medium of photography. The picturesque came to the art of photography in India, notably through Samuel Bourne. Prime examples are his photographs of Himalayan terrain, made between 1863 and 1866. Bourne’s spectacular views, by screening out any unseemly element, remind us to see the lurking inequities, of wage relations, and violence, within the practice of British photography in India. Bourne built his reputation as the master of the picturesque quite literally on the backs of his coolies, who carried the heavy and fragile photographic equipment, and tents and other amenities, up the impossibly high slopes and in treacherous and unknown terrains. The picturesque framed Indian landscapes as beautiful and controllable. It diminished the presence of people within them. Critics find in the genre a visual allegory of colonialist viewpoints. Yet, it proved lucrative for Indian photographic businesses too. Softly toned, neat photographs of waterfronts, cities and buildings of India came to be highly prized as souvenirs. The spectacular career of Lala Deen Dayal is the best-known example of an Indian photographer profiting from this demand. In the 1880s, an album of Indian views by Deen Dayal fetched anywhere between Rs 50 and Rs 200.

CONTESTING THE EMPIRE

By the end of the nineteenth century, the commercial studios of Indian photographers far outnumbered those of the British and Europeans. As yet, we know little about them and of photography’s economic histories in India. In recent times, however, Narayan Virkar, who had a studio in Bombay during the 1910s, has been celebrated as a ‘nationalist photographer’. Virkar’s photographs of Raigad Fort showcase his ability to re-create photographically the majesty of historical spaces. They convey the sheer force of Maratha architecture, and thereby of Shivaji’s power. This contrasts with and visually undermines the colonial government’s decision in 1909, to protect the fort with Shivaji’s tomb in such a way as to stem ‘the revival of the objectionable Shivaji cult’.

The beginning of postcard production in India, from 1896, disseminated photographic images to a large section of the population. The publishers, playing to current interpretations for marketing purposes, or expressing their own beliefs, propagated divergent identities. Histories and identities could be contested even in the titles of archaeological postcards. Delhi publisher H.A. Mirza’s titles and captions, for example, offered a less empire-stained worldview than those of British firms like Tuck & Sons. Many Indian publishers chose not to caption monuments according to religious categories. In this way, postcards became signposts to history in the hands of Indians who had their own interests in archaeological and historical excavations.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS CURRENCY

As early as 1857, the London Stereographic Company had sold 50,000 stereoscopes, including those of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ (the Uprising), voraciously consumed in the West. The views of India which were produced and packaged in sets for sale by specialist stereoscopic firms such as Underwood and Underwood, with long captions about the history and novelty of the image, changed perceptions about monuments. They themselves became tourist objects, to visit and see. Postcards shuttled between countries through commercial networks, through the Suez Canal, helping to build the first image information superhighway. They were a global product, and India soon became one of the largest markets. By 1908, tens of millions of illustrated postcards a year were sent within and from India. They could be purchased at retailers and from hawkers, and collectors traded in them with fellow collectors around the world. By the beginning of the twentieth century, photographs of Indian monuments were key players in fashioning what was to be visualised as the past. They were valued as currencies of exchange between institutions, to allow analytical comparisons and to fill in what was seen as gaps in collections. Their creation, consumption and circulation nurtured the materiality of an Indian cultural heritage that was ‘there’, to be seen, known and experienced.