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‘Histories in the Making’: Photos that hide as much as they reveal
Summary
An ongoing show draws attention to the connected histories of photography and field surveys between 1855 and 1920
At the ongoing exhibition, Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments (1855-1920), at DAG, New Delhi, one can see several photographs by Felice Beato— an Italian-British photographer, who arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1858, to make commercial gains out of the Mutiny, or the first war of Independence of 1857, when it was almost over. He photographed sites in Delhi, Agra, Lucknow and Kanpur, where people had risen to rebellion with “a clear focus upon the British travails and victories". “Beato’s well-known, indeed infamous, photograph of a courtyard of the Sikandar Bagh (Lucknow) with re-arranged human and animal bones illustrates the ‘fiction that photography could introduce into the recording of historical events.’," writes Sudeshna Guha in an introduction to the eponymous book accompanying the exhibition.
Photography, when it was introduced in 1839 in Europe, was proclaimed as a way of showing the truth. Around the same time, the field sciences of archaeology and anthropology were launched, which too were aimed at documenting the real, based on the ground evidence. But when you look at Beato’s photographs, or read books such as L’Art Hindous (1885), one wonders how much that one sees in the imagery is staged or veiled under the artist or author’s interpretation.
“Through the exhibition and the accompanying text panels, I hope to complicate the idea of documentation and recording, and provide a nuanced view of the colonial surveillance," says Guha, who is a professor at Shiv Nadar University (department of History and Archaeology) and a former curator of the photographic collections of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. “What emerges is that photographers at the time were not documenting but creating versions of history. Hence the title, Histories in the Making."
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Through a collection of early photographs of monuments, which also nurtured the picturesque imagery, by the likes of Beato, Linnaeus Tripe, Thomas Biggs, Edmund Lyon, Samuel Bourne, Lala Deen Dayal, Narayan Vinayak Virkar, and more, the exhibition draws attention to the connected histories of photography and field surveys of ancient India. It also highlights the overlapping domains of colonialism, science and scholarship. “These images capture a moment in history when the British Empire was consolidating its power in India, and the documentation of the subcontinent's monuments served both as a means of asserting control and as a way to showcase the empire's achievements to audiences back in Europe," mentions Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director, DAG, in the exhibition note. The accompanying publication illustrates over 150 objects created through photographic technology including paper and glass negatives, collotype, albumen and silver gelatin prints, stereographs, postcards and cabinet cards.
The exhibition and the book also look at how photography started its journey in India within months of the announcement in Europe. “In October 1839, the newly appointed professor of chemistry at the Calcutta Medical School, Dr William Brooke O' Shaughnessy of the Bengal Medical Service, demonstrated his photogenic drawings to members of the Bengal Asiatic Society," writes Guha in her essay. She further mentions that by 1847, scholarship on Indian history was being carefully streamlined into two distinct modes of field enquiry, archaeological and architectural, because of the self-styling of two pioneering protagonists, Alexander Cunningham and James Fergusson.
While the former embarked on archaeological surveys through excavations in Sarnath, Fergusson left a lucrative indigo business to start architectural surveys in India, 1835 onwards. He went on to publish detailed reports of his surveys of the rock cut caves of western India in 1846, and then an extensive monograph, Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindoostan (1848). He brought attention to the vandalism of many monuments he had seen, after which the Cave Temple Commission was established by the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society for the inspection of “sites of ancient towns".
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Such examples illustrate, time and again in the exhibition, how photography and field sciences went hand in hand to craft a narrative of history. Take the photos of Edmund Lyon, for instance, of the archaeological and architectural sites of southern India including Madurai, Tanjore, Bellary and Vijayanagara. An officer of the British Army, Lyon arrived in India in 1865 and established a studio in Ooty. Of all his photos, one of the most well-known is the retouched photo of one of the long corridors of the temple at Rameswaram (Tamil Nadu) taken between 1867-68. “Photography was celebrated as taking pictures of all that you see. But what you see here are the limitations of photographic scrutiny. In spite of the fact that Lyons could illuminate the dark corridor using aluminium sheets, he still had to retouch the negative after the photo was developed, so that the details of the sculptural elements of the pillars could be seen. That made one realise that photographs were not the only way of documenting. The significance of illustrations, plans and section drawings would never really go away," explains Guha.
In fact, architectural photography of India between the 1850s and 60s often entailed retrieval of key events of British colonialism of the pre-photographic era. Tropes of visual memory were employed to recreate those moments. Take, for example, the photographs of Linnaeus Tripe, who became the Government Photographer of Madras Presidency, and who went on to create six lavish albums. These, together with 120 atmospheric views of Burma taken in 1855, “illuminate his purpose, namely to document the civilising mission of British colonialism".
In 1856, the first issue of the Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album was published by a commercial photographic firm in Bombay, William Henderson and William Johnson, in collaboration with an Indian photographic firm in the city, Merwanjee Bomonjee and Co. This is one of the first such albums of Indian views. “Once you make these kinds of albums, you are creating something that was not there—you are creating a certain kind of Indian culture, traditions, past and history, whose evident reality is ascertained as a photographic representation. So, through the exhibition, I want to gently coax viewers to think with the photos and not see them just as images," says Guha.
One of the most interesting parts of the exhibition pertains to how Indian photographers adapted to the medium. The 1850s also saw the establishment of photographic societies as well, with the first one started in the Bombay Presidency on 3 October 1854 as a platform for amateur photographers to document India’s socio cultural landscape. After this, two other came up in the Madras and Bengal Presidencies as well. “All three admitted natives and ladies, seen at the time to have little scientific temperament. So, photography was a leveller. Indian photographers could display their works alongside those of the British and Europeans, and many were awarded the societies’ gold and silver medals," says Guha.
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In fact, she writes in the book about some of the Indian founder-members of these societies such as Vinayak Gangadhar Shastri, Ardaseer Cursetjee and Bhau Daji of that of Bombay, and Rajendralal Mitra and Raja Ishwar Chandra Singh of Bengal. “Also remember, the Photographic Society of Bengal was the only one, which publicly declared Rajendralal Mitra as a brilliant photographer, even as he was being thrown out of his membership in 1857, having criticised the indigo planters," she says. A lot of the Indian photographers’ work was deeply appreciated. For instance, Narayan Daji’s waxed paper negatives of points of views and buildings were sumptuously praised, as was Hurrichand Chintamon’s portrait of a ‘boy smoking’ at the Bombay exhibition of February 1856. Incidentally, the latter was from the first batch of the first photography course in India, at Elphinstone Institute of Bombay, in 1855.
“The ‘natives’—I use the word only to make the distinction—learnt photography from the Europeans and mastered it. For instance, there was F. Schranzhofer, a calotypist, and F.M. Montario practised with the daguerreotype in Kolkata in the mid-1840s. Although one can see a colonial gaze in the commissioned photos taken by officers of the East India Company, there are many ways in which the photos also demand a look of the native agency in the early photography of India," says Guha. In this context, Narayan Vinayak Virkar becomes significant. He followed the path of Tripe in creating a visual memory, but of a key historical event of Indian nationalism of the pre-photographic period—of the might of Chhatrapati Shivaji, which seem to emanate from his photos of the Raigad fort. Virkar had his own photography studio in Girgaum, Mumbai. “Through the exhibition, I also hope to encourage enquiries into the economic histories of photography. We know the history of large commercial firms, but how much did a local photo wallah charge in the late 19th and early-20th century? Many such unexplored questions open up with the show," says Guha
The exhibition can be viewed at DAG, New Delhi, till 12 October
