CAMERA INDICA

Photography as history and memory in the 19th century.

RAM RAHMAN

OVER the last decade, the history of 19th century photography in India has become a field of widening interest as well as charged debate. As historians begin to explore a variety of sources, photography has become a focus for culture studies, post-colonial analysis and lit-crit theorists who mine it for both archival and visual language possibilities. The photography produced in India in the 19th century, apart from constituting a large body of work, is also of exceptionally fine quality. Produced by both British and Indian photographers, professional as well as amateur ones, this body of work is now in the process of revival and reinterpretation.

In 1995, the British Council organised a large exhibition of photographs that toured across India, generating heated debate on a number of issues. Titled "A Shifting Focus", that exhibition was primarily drawn from one of the greatest collections of this work - the Oriental and India Office Collections, now incorporated into the British Library in London. It was seen firstly to be a highly sanitised version of the colonial experience presented from a British perspective. There was almost no mention of the 1857 uprising, very little of the Raj - no pictures which showed the nature of the relationship of ruler and ruled and other sensitive issues. It was also criticised for being an exhibition of facsimile prints. It turned out that no original prints were brought to India as the entire India Office Collection is under dispute and is claimed by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as former India Government property, which was not repatriated after Independence. The British were apparently afraid that the originals would be seized by the Indian Government in the pursuit of this claim!

In what was a subtle nationalist response, Ebrahim Alkazi, now one of the biggest private collectors of work from that period, showed a large exhibition of original prints in Bombay and Delhi following the British Council show. Particularly interesting were original prints of the 1857 uprising from Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow by Felice Beato which had not been seen in India before. Alkazi's accompanying textual comments were written from an Indian perspective, and the photographs were contextualised in a post-colonial nationalist historiography. If these recent events stimulated a debate on the social function of photography and its utility as an instrument of historical documentation, the two books under review further the debate and succeed in clarifying many of the underlying issues.

A panorama of Delhi, taken from the northern minaret of the Jama Masjid. It captures on film many buildings which were destroyed between 1858 and 1860 as part of the military reorganisation of Delhi when all buildings within 500 metres of the Red Fort were demolished.

An element of overlap is provided between these two books by the work of Felice Beato, an Italian born British photographer who remains an enigma almost a century and a half after his work in India was accomplished, because there is little information about him available. Beato arrived in India in 1858, in the immediate aftermath of the 1857 uprising. He brought with him the experience gained in photographing the Crimean War. While known as a pioneer of war photography, Beato's work has a much wider sweep. He was a professional commercial photographer and made a living by selling photographs to individuals - a practice that would today be described as freelancing. He was not attached to the East India Company and was not a representative of the Queen or her government.

Beato's photographs of Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow have become a part of the mythology of 1857 - as document, nostalgia and archive. Both these books examine Beato's work in the light of current trends. Jim Masselos and Narayani Gupta have published an entire album on his Delhi photographs which is in a private collection in Australia. Masselos is a historian who has studied and worked in India and has written on Indian nationalism.

Narayani Gupta is well-known for her work on the urban history of Delhi and teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. Understandably, their book presents a look at Beato through essentially Indian eyes. Both their texts are filled with references to contemporary accounts of Delhi by Ghalib and Sayyid Ahmad Khan (who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the city's architecture). Masselos visited the sites of many of the Beato pictures and photographed them while he was attached to the Indian Council of Historical Research in Delhi in 1997. His contemporary pictures are reproduced along with Beato's, and the juxtapositions are part of the structure of this book.

Narayani Gupta writes an account of the way Delhi has been seen through the ages till the present - how each generation constructed a Delhi of the imagination, which became part of the cultural fabric of the city. Gupta also provides a text with each photograph which similarly places it in historical memory as well as in a contemporary urban historical context. This book is an essential addition to any library as a primary document of the events of 1857 as well as a crucial moment in photographic history.

The Kashmiri Gate, the double gate built by militarty engineer Robert Smith in 1835. The storming of the Gate turned the tide in favour of the British forces. (Right) The house within the King's Palace in which King Bahadur Shah was confined by the British forces.

Considering the scholarly neglect it has faced, it is difficult now to appreciate how deep an imprint the 1857 uprising - the biggest single armed uprising against colonialism in the entire 19th century - left on the Imperial imagination. Indeed, the echoes of this uprising resonated through Imperial capitals right till the dissolution of empire beginning with the middle of the 20th century. The Australian Beato Albums (there are two volumes with 28 pictures each), assembled by some individual in Delhi, represent an important commemoration of this event.

Unfortunately, the reproductions, while attempting to give a sense of the originals with their sepia toning, suffer in terms of both size and detail. One of the highlights of early photography was the reproduction of prints by direct contact from very large negatives - both paper and glass. The resulting sharpness and richness of tone and detail in an original print are stunning for a modern viewer used to seeing enlargements and reproduction by offset print processes.

THIS does not, however, detract from the importance of this book. Firstly, the pictures themselves. Beato is one of the earliest photographers to record Delhi after the devastation of 1857. His pictures show a city emptied of its population and bearing the scars of the ferocious battles that preceded his arrival. In his text, Masselos discusses the entire question of the photograph being used as an instrument of Empire in the context of current theory that there is no such thing as an objective photograph which presents an external reality as a document devoid of opinion, comment and perception. He is right in placing Beato's work in the context of his practice as a commercial photographer. The pictures he made of the sites of conflict and of incidents associated with the uprising were made for a ready market. Therefore, by their choice of subject matter and site, they helped in the creation of an Imperial mythology about 1857, even as the last embers of the rebellion flickered across the plains of north India. There are images of the positions of the gun batteries on the Delhi Ridge, Metcalfe house, the Qudsia Bagh, Kashmiri Gate and Mori Gate bastions which were the sites of ferocious fighting. Also represented is the house within the fort where Bahadur Shah Zafar was held before his trial and banishment to Rangoon.

Looking at the pictures themselves, it is hard to read the intent of the photographer. While the images, for us, speak on many levels, they are also exceptionally good photographs. The same sites, which for the British may have symbolised great courage, for instance, the Kashmiri Gate, can be seen by a contemporary Delhi-wallah in a totally different light. It becomes the site of a tragic lost opportunity, where the British forces could have been repelled had there been better organised resistance. For anyone interested in architectural or urban history, the pictures also provide the most detailed record of the city before the huge changes wrought by the British as they seized control and subjugated a populace that they claimed had forfeited their trust. This is vividly shown in the stunning panorama made by Beato from atop one of the minarets of the Jama Masjid. In its original form in the album, this is 6 feet long.

Unfortunately, in the book, it is reproduced over many pages, and in relatively small format. It still shows the urban form of Shahjahan's city, and especially the area between the Jama Masjid and the Lal Qila (Red Fort), densely populated, which was completely levelled by the occupiers to create an open ground around the fort that could easily be defended with armour and artillery.

Many of these pictures show us the city after it has already died - it is a skeleton, empty of life, about to be amputated further. They show how decrepit and run-down the fort - much of which was levelled shortly after these pictures were taken - had become from the inside. Contemporary authors have written of the penury of the last emperor and particularly the huge extended population of Mughal descent who lived within the fort and the palace. The photographs of the palace from the Jamuna, with the river still flowing next to the walls, show the domes blasted off the beautiful marble pavilions, temporary brick additions and tattered chicks (bamboo curtains) covering the marble jalis (lattices). The pictures of the British positions on the ridge show how little greenery there was - scrub, a few trees and thorny bushes. This is in sharp contrast to the present. Much of the greenery of Delhi is relatively new, having emerged during the construction of New Delhi in the last century.

Other pictures within this album do not relate to 'mutiny' sites at all - but are essentially tourist pictures - of the Qutb Minar complex, of Jantar Mantar and the Safdarjung tomb. In these one sees the pleasure of the photographer in making fine pictures of remarkable architecture and picturesque ruins. It is difficult to impose a reading of a colonial mindset or agenda in these photographs, and Masselos rightly questions some recent, fairly simplistic, categorisations of all British photography in India as colonial, all done from the viewpoint of ownership of the land and the sites and with few natives present. We must also remember the British interest in architecture and their romance with the picturesque ruin - they were doing very similar photographs of their own buildings and sites in Britain at exactly the same time. Masselos also reminds us that the pictures were bought from the photographer as individual prints and assembled in albums by the purchasers. These albums reveal as much about the collector as the individual pictures do about the photographer. They have also been used widely in the years since they were produced to buttress the interpretations of different writers. Here, as a complete album, they are probably truer to the spirit of Felice Beato himself. The Masselos and Gupta book is about a multilayered approach to visual history and benefits greatly from such a viewpoint.

INDIA Through The Lens is a book accompanying an exhibition at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington curated by the art historian Vidya Dehejia. In effect, this is a survey of work from the 1850s till the Imperial Durbar of 1911, the high point of the British Raj.

It is structured by sections which cover different genres - the panorama, architecture and anthropology, the landscape, the rajahs. As in the Beato book, Vidya Dehejia discusses the question of the objectivity of photography as it was practised in India. Dehejia's introduction provides a general history of photography but is more noteworthy for the debunking of certain orientalist interpretations of Indian photographers and their particularly Indian viewpoint propagated by Judith Mara Guttman in her exhibition and book Through Indian Eyes. Dehejia's experience as an art historian gives her the tools to rebuff the romantic and simplistic notion that a native photographer had the ingrained vision of a miniature painter and could therefore construct his photograph with spatial ideas akin to the painters. Her essay places photography in the context of the other visual arts in the subcontinent and the British interest in them. The other contributors to the book are British or American. The texts seem to be for the general reader, and an Indian audience will notice that the approach of most of the authors as fairly typically 'Raj', written from a slightly nostalgic viewpoint.

For a photography historian, John Falconer's two essays - one on the panorama and the other on photography of architecture and ethnography, are the most valuable in this book. Both are filled with detailed and scholarly information on individual photographers, their histories and the evolution of the profession. Falconer is a specialist in this field and is the curator of photography of the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library. Beginning with a stunning set of panoramas, Falconer provides a fascinating history of this genre in photography, of which there are many fine examples from across India. Many of the panoramas are printed as extended fold-out pages, which give some idea of the scale of these meticulously executed works. Falconer's second essay on architecture and ethnography details the 19th century notions of documentation. One of the riches of this book is in fact the huge number of architectural photographs.

The British were obviously fascinated by the architecture they found in India and photography became the primary tool to document this, and indeed, an aid in writing the first histories of Indian architecture, which we use to this day. Falconer provides a lucid account of this. What is missing from this book though, is a critical reflection on this process as also the total absence of any references to work in the field by Indian scholars. The most notable omission perhaps is the work of Tapati Guha Thakurta, particularly her lectures and papers on the archaeological imagination in Indian art, on how the studies of Alexander Cunningham impacted on art theorists at the turn of the century primarily through photographs. In the popular imagination, the categorisation of architectural styles that the British arrived at through their process of photographic documentation - Buddhist, Jain, Hindu and Islamic in that order - remains both unchallenged and insufficiently elaborated. Falconer also touches on the use of photography to create an ethnographic archive. The photographs of Andaman tribal people have become a classic example of the classification of people through physical and racial characteristics. In fact, this is one area where there was no ambiguity about the colonial project and photography. India in fact was a developing ground for fingerprinting, police photography and many such uses of the technique for control and surveillance.

THE other contributions to the book are disappointing. Felice Beato has his own section, with a larger selection of his Lucknow photographs. Samuel Bourne is represented by his landscapes, but the selection here seems lacklustre. While Bourne's work has been the subject of heated debate, he was also one of the finest landscape photographers of his time. There are many examples here of the picturesque, and for the rulers, familiar and comforting views, he made in the 1860s of the hill stations in the Himalayas - with churches, cottages and fenced walkways, showing the simulated recreation of an English country village where the ruling elite of the Raj could holiday. Yet Bourne also made path-breaking and visually powerful views of the barren valleys of the high Himalayas. These can really only be seen as a photographer reacting with excitement and awe to a great subject, who then records it with the full command of his craft.

Lala Deen Dayal, as the only prominent native photographer, has his own section, presented under the title "Between Two Worlds". Most of his photographs here are architectural, though there are some landscapes too. Looking at these we confront the issue of an 'Indian' vision. One would be hard-pressed to say whether these pictures are any different from those made by a British photographer, indeed if the medium allows the possibility of such distinctions in terms of style.

There are sections on the Imperial durbars ending in 1911 and on the maharajas. The pictures of the durbars, while showing the pageantry with which the British sought to emulate the Mughals, seem to be added on to complete the picture. They do not have the visual charge of the sections on architecture in this book and show mainly distant views of the temporary camps and processions. More telling are pictures of King George V with native princes at the same Delhi durbar, many of which were exhibited by Alkazi.

Both these books must be welcomed as important additions to the corpus of works on 19th century photography, but The Last Empire: Photography in British India 1855-1911, by Clark Worswick published in 1976 and still in print, remains the book of record on the period with its wide range of material, its careful choice of visually exciting work, and its impeccable reproduction. The Last Empire gives a more complete sense of India under British rule, through its depiction of both the grand trappings of the Raj and its attention to the life of the more ordinary footsoldiers of Empire.

India Through the Lens, while better and more expensively printed than Beato's Delhi, suffers from a slightly heightened contrast in the reproductions. What it does do is to present a larger body of this material, which expands the visual archive available to the public. And any history of photography would have to recognise the fact that the work of this period would rank with the finest of all time.

Beato's Delhi 1857, 1997 by Jim Masselos and Narayani Gupta; Ravi Dayal Publisher, New Delhi, 2000; pages 115, Rs.1,000.

India Through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911, Vidya Dehejia (Editor); Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd. Ahmedabad, 2000; pages 315, Rs.3,000.