Marshall's plans

Archaeology, photography and authority went hand in hand in the colonial era.

The present volume is the outcome of another visually exciting collaborative venture between the Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin Publishing. It commemorates 150 years of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Apart from over a hundred brilliantly reproduced photographs, a few drawings and a map, a preface by D P Chattopadhyaya and scholarly articles by the editor, Michael S Dodson, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Christopher Pinney and Robert Harding afford the volume an important space in the slowly growing corpus of material on the photographic visual in academic research.

In 1902, Cambridge-educated John Marshall, who had just finished excavating in Greece, was appointed Director General of the ASI, initially for a period of five years; in 1906, the tenure was extended till his retirement in 1931. During his long innings, Marshall garnered a rich harvest of archaeological photographs that filled several volumes for, as Guha comments, by this time the “growing trend of photographic recording and scrutiny of monuments went hand-in-hand with the tightening institutional grip of the colonial state”. The Marshall albums comprised photographs of the ASI’s restoration and excavation work during this period, of uncovered artefacts, and so on. The present volume draws on those from Marshall’s personal collection as well as other photographic holdings initiated by him.

Guha argues that suspicion of indigenous texts was replaced by a glorification of ruins and antiquities. In a Positivist world, the photograph helped in the growth of archaeology as a rational science. As Michael Dodson shows in his chapter, “Orientalism and Archaeology: Writing the History of South Asia, 1600-1860”, when the antiquarian Markham Kittoe used bricks excavated at Sarnath for the construction of Benares College, he was using an ancient Buddhist civilisation to “literally and figuratively... serve the British colonial enterprise”. That early excavators often paid scant notice to the damage their activities caused is effectively argued by art historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta in “The Many Lives of the Sanchi Stupa in Colonial India”. The field archaeologist Alexander Cunningham thought nothing of “opening up” the main stupa at Sanchi by driving a shaft from the top to the centre of the hemisphere, “to ferret out the reliquary caskets”. His exhilaration at being able to identify many of the monks whose remains were buried within outshone any need to repair the structural breaches.

Guha-Thakurta draws attention to the fact that photographic documentation of the process of discovery, recovery and conservation of historic sites was merely a further step in the process of on-the-spot drawing, engravings and lithographic representations of fast-decaying monuments. By the 1860s, she says, “the relative value of different forms of representation... was closely deliberated”. The visual aided the specialist while the actual monuments remained on site — or, in rare cases, very nearly did not. Apparently, in 1856, Sikander Begum, Begum of Bhopal, was prevailed upon to make a gift of the eastern gateway of the stupa to Queen Victoria. Difficulties in dismantling and problems of transportation and, soon enough, the events of 1857, stalled what might have been another “Elgin Marbles” scenario.

Understandably, Sanchi occupies most of the authors, as it did Marshall. In an imaginative essay, Christopher Pinney wonders what Buddhist pilgrims would have felt on arriving at “a super-charged place of remarkable visual complexity”. For those not on the spot, photography is the consolation. It becomes pradakshina. It has its limitations, but “it is able to efficaciously mirror both the framed and measured, as well as the subjective darshanic desire for ‘description’ and iconicity”. We are encouraged to visualise what the overwhelmed pilgrims felt when they reached the site — cleverly revealed to us in a panoramic spread of work under way: the central stupa, the gateways, a wheelbarrow in the foreground, workers and officers arranged around a cluster in the back, while a tired man rests beneath a tree.

Some of the earliest photographs are taken by Deen Dayal, a particularly evocative one being that of a sculpture of back-to-back lions lying on its side. This was taken in 1886, long years before the not-dissimilar lion capital atop the Ashokan pillar at Sarnath became the emblem of independent India.

Apart from his official commitment to the visual, Marshall was a keen photographer and a gardener. This volume contains carefully composed photographs of his family — his wife Florence, their children John and Margaret, and Margaret’s governess Miss Dickinson. In keeping with the photographic discourse of the times, there is an interesting though studied composition of the Marshall children with numerous servants on a houseboat on the Dal Lake in Srinagar. An able and competent upholder of the Raj, Marshall knew the importance of visual documentation — of his work for official purposes and of the memsahib and babalog recorded for the family back home and for posterity. It mattered little if Florence looked a trifle forlorn in some shots, or he appeared a tad dour — empire-building was not easy and viewers were to be made aware of what was at stake. By juxtaposing the public with the private, The Marshall Albums gives us a grand view of the empire at work and allows us to reflect on individual lives in the complicated interface between cultures.

Malavika Karlekar edits the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She is the author of Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915

THE MARSHALL ALBUMS
Photography and Archaeology
Editor: Sudeshna Guha
Publisher: Mapin and Alkazi Collection of Photography
Pages: 288
Price: Rs 3,500