Three titles capture the stunning diversity evident in the formative years of photography in India.
Bourne waited for two days for the right conditions to capture, in exquisite, minute detail, that moment in the morning when two men hold conversation on a bridge over a glen near Darjeeling. But even Bourne is a small part of the bigger picture — the journey of photography in India ever since the latter’s inception in 1804. Now, more about the journey emerges in two publications by The Alkazi Collection of Photography and an analysis by anthropologist Christopher Penny, showcasing the principal techniques used, the diversity in subject matter and play in the depictions.
“Almost two centuries after the growth of miniature art in and around north India, the evolution of visual arts from the mid 19th century onwards, almost without exception, integrated photography,” writes Rahaab Allana, curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, in Painted Photographs — Coloured Portraiture in India.
Looking back, two types of photography made their way to India initially. The first to come was the French daguerreotype process. Though not one of the earliest techniques, it enabled rapid exposures for portraits. While first efforts overseas had included brilliant monochrome exposures of the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Abraham Lincoln, in India, the technique became widely popular with the genre of painted photographs. The presence of a large number of highly-skilled miniature artists, well-versed in reproducing colour, was a big factor that contributed to the success of this genre in India.
It is also easy to see why it found broader appeal: Taking the example of Rajasthan, Allana says that the prevalence of royal courts meant that chitra kala, or the art of painting, was structured upon the idea of embellishment. Miniature artists moved, en masse, to work on the new prints.
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However, compositions which had initially relied on trying to capture notions of an opulent past gradually got bolder and starker after 1880, sometimes even using Victorian props. The “stylistic appropriation” was required for works to be published in newspapers, books and journals as half-tone images. The style also was favourbale for the rise of photographic studios as thriving businesses. The Parsis were the first to profit with people such as S Hormusjee and Shapoor N Bhedwar becoming much sought-after even by middle-class Indians for family portraits and weddings pictures.
The highlight of many of the works in this period was women subjects. Using their powers to override the prevalent purdah system, male royalty exploited the easy availability of willing subjects in their respective harems.
For instance, the chromolithograph by Jaipur’s Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II, A Nautch Dancing Girl In Her Toilet, gives access to an intimate space which would not have been usually available to the ordinary male viewer. Such instances have been noted by Allana as milestones in the “intense social upheaval and transformation” during the period.
The second photographic process, calotype, which used waxed negatives, became the chosen vehicle to facilitate landscapes, primarily because of the ease of use during long travel. For instance, it was used exclusively by photographers while documenting the ruins at Hampi (Vijayanagara — Splendour in Ruins).
The pioneer was a British army captain Alexander Greenlaw who adapted and simplified the originally cumbersome calotype process to deliver stunning results in extremely large formats. His work is best seen in his use of shadow in the portrait of the Narasimha monolith. In monochrome print, the statue, shot from a look-up angle, is said to reduce the viewer into insignificance.
The waxed negative offers a breathtaking inverse play of shadow and highlight. The ruins, today, a UNESCO World Heritage site, also saw a first in that Greenlaw and his fellows used carefully placed human subjects to impart a size comparator to the architecture. This would have been a great challenge then considering that calotype takes long to expose due to small apertures used.
Christopher Pinney, professor of art history at the Northwestern University and professor of anthropology and visual culture, University College, London, is true to his promise of delivering a bold analysis in The Coming of Photography in India. He credits the celebrated Samuel Bourne with being a “pre-eminent figure in any aesthetic history of photography in colonial India” but also points out how Bourne used altitude to “look down on a picturesquely ordered India”.
Pinney also takes a stand on the duty of a photographer to the moral right when he lambasts Bourne for ignoring the atrocities committed by British indigo planters while supressing the ryots (peasants). Bourne, for instance, had chosen to depict a “bucolic village hamlet” in Bengal — from a distance.
Credit is given to photographers for overcoming the crippling technomaterial complexity of working in India in that period. A typical expedition involved travelling on the “clattering dak (mail coach)” and marching with huge teams of coolies, up to 30, carrying cameras, chemicals, tents, bedding and provisions. Bourne, in a narrative, emphasises that “packages should be as far as possible small and light”.
Modern photography has definitely achieved that. Then, there is the remarkable story of John Blees in 1877, the railway guard who turned photographer. He began with taking convict photographs because studios shunned them for not paying enough. He then took to photopainting and even published Photography in Hindostan; or Reminiscences of a Travelling Photographer.
Pinney reserves his commendation — “greatest early body of work in daguerreotype” — for Ahmed Ali Khan “Chota Miya”, a designer/architect-turned-photographer. Khan served in Wajid Ali Shah’s court at Lucknow in the late-1840s, mid-1850s. He designed Kaiserbagh, an important building in Lucknow, with its mermaid court insignia and captured the same in his photographs.
Finally, there is Narayan Vinayak Virkar, who intimately documented the independence struggle.
Here, Pinney points out the irony of him composing portraits of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Chandra Bose and M K Gandhi in the “opulence and comfort of a bourgeois European photographic studio”. Virkar’s photographs are, however, important documentation of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. His images show up the bullets-pocked wall covered in anti-Dyer graffitti. These are images that have indeed endured.
THE COMING OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN INDIA
Author: Christopher Pinney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Pages: x + 166
Price: Rs 1,295.
PAINTED PHOTOGRAPHS
Author: Coloured Portraiture in India
Publisher: The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Pages: 88
Price: Rs 1,200. VIJAYNAGARA
Author: Splendour in Ruins
Publisher: The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Pages: 247
Price: Rs 2,850