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The colonising camera
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The photographs in India through the Lens and India: Pioneering Photographers, testify handsomely to the technical and aesthetic quality of the work that resulted from the Indian embrace of photography, says SUNIL KHILNANI.
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WITHIN a few months of the announcement of the first daguerreotype in Paris in 1839, photography had arrived in India. The effects were explosive: the new medium rapidly found enthusiasts, and by the 1850s photographic societies (some with their own monthly journals) as well as a number of thriving studios had sprung up in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras; and by 1855, the East India Company had decided to replace its draughtsmen with photographers.
The photographs in these two books — catalogues both, Vidya Dehejia's of a major show held at the Smithsonian's Sackler and Free galleries, John Falconer's of an exhibition held at London's Brunei Gallery — testify handsomely to the technical and aesthetic quality of the work that resulted from the Indian embrace of photography. They are very largely concerned with European photographers who worked in India, though the work of Indian photographers does figure at the edges (Dehejia has a chapter on the Indian master photographer, Lala Deen Dayal). Both books draw their material largely from the collections of the Oriental and India Office at the British Library and from the private collection of Howard and Jane Ricketts.
What did the advent of photography in India mean? Did it mark a radical disruption to and discontinuity with existing ways of seeing India? Or did, as Milo Beach asserts in his foreword to the Dehejia volume, photography do no more than provide a new and "stimulating means to explore India, not a radical change of vision"? Did photography simply reinforce European ways of seeing, or was it absorbed into an "Indian way of seeing"? How one chooses to answer such questions about rupture or continuity will depend on how one views the history of photography in India: what exactly one takes to be its identity or subject matter. A pervasive view has emerged in recent years.
This makes its own the assumption that photography has no intrinsic identify or subject matter: it is best seen as a "practice", as "a mode of cultural production", whose history is contiguous with that of the social and political uses to which it is put. In the colonial context, the camera wielded by white Europeans was an intrusive weapon of domination. It created and subjected an exotic other: roving across the fields of ethnography, history, architecture, portraiture, it produced a disciplinary knowledge that was used to rule the colonised. The products of "the colonising camera" must therefore be read in terms of "conventions and institutions", of disciplines and practices: photographs are ideological texts, to be unravelled and exposed. Yet photography was a medium that Indians came themselves to take up with great energy, one which they used to invent themselves in both their public and private lives — it was a crucial element in the spread of nationalism, as well as in the definition of the modern Indian family. Seen thus, it is hard to connect the "postcolonial" reading of the history of photography in India with its actual history over the past 150 years.
The photographs assembled in these two books are of interest precisely because they suggest, in indirect ways, different possibilities of thinking about this history. Above all, they encourage a view that would see these early photographs of India not as ideological signs of other processes, but as forms of technical and cultural experiment, whose results were not always predictable or conforming to wider political imperatives. Instead of merely being documents in an archive of colonial oppression, the meanings of this work might be recognised as more uncertain. Dehejia herself notes a degree of ambiguity regarding the status of early photography: "Current discussion among professionals centres around whether the rightful place for such works is in collections storage (where art objects reside) or in archives (home to documentary material)."
The photographs in both of these two books would certainly justify a more aesthetically directed approach. A great number of the images are, simply put, beautiful. Most have a mesmerising stillness and clarity, and one lingers over even the more ordinary ones, as they yield up secrets and surprises. Many are devoid of people; and being without colour (with one exception, a hand painted portrait of a Maharaja, the tones are sepia: ranging from a deep brown to black and white), they make a stark contrast to how India is usually photographed today. There is little sense of the palpableness of India; rather, one finds in them a concentrated, meditated vacancy, and in this respect they provide a fascinating echo to and historical reference for some of the finest work being done in contemporary Indian photography today. Some of these photographs — for instance Samuel Bourne's "Picturesque Bridge over the Rungnoo below Ging, Darjeeling" (1869) — with their flattening and extrusion of planes, have the becalmed quality of pictorial dioramas. And it is striking to see photographs by Deen Dayal — "Troops returning to Delhi" (1882-84) and "Elephant Battery in Action at Fort Jhansi" (1882-84) — , which have an epic cinematographic quality. But, from the point of view of mapping a different history of photography in India, the work of Donald Horne Macfarlane is a true revelation. Little is known about him. But his work shows a refined, sensual eye fascinated by surfaces and deep textures: even when ostensibly representational, such as his "Dutch tombs at Surat" (1860), or his photographs of foliage, his work attains an abstract quality. That quality is most fully achieved in a staggering photograph from 1862, entitled "Rocks, Darjeeling" — Jane Ricketts, in her essay on Macfarlane in the Dehejia volume is right to describe this as an "extraordinarily powerful image that must be seen as one of the most remarkable and innovative images of the 19th Century.
In the face of this rich subject matter, Dehejia's and Falconer's efforts to set out the terms for a different history of the medium as it develops in India are somewhat half-hearted — they are sufficiently constrained by the regnant protocols of "postcolonial" history not to venture too far away from these. Falconer's texts are especially useful and informative, but both he and Dehejia are driven more by curatorial instincts than by a desire for bold historiographical redirection.
The photographs in the books have a mesmerising stillness and clarity.
They organise their selected photographs in three related ways: by chronological periods, by theme, and by individual photographers and studios. The chronological periodisation is defined by different thematic concerns as well as by the presence of different patrons and markets. From the late 1840s to mid-1850s, amateurs like Fredrick Fiebig produced calotype panoramas, sweeping cityscapes of colonial India — the Maidan in Calcutta, Elphinstone (now Horniman) Circle in Bombay — as well as of Rajput cities and of the "native" quarters of Indian cities; others, like John Murray made exquisite paper negatives of architectural monuments, around Agra and Delhi. From the mid-1850s, alongside the spread of photographic societies, professionals began to practice: men like Linnaeus Tripe, appointed as the first (and only) official Madras Presidency Photographer and charged with documenting temple and archaeological sites.
After the 1857 Uprising, photography was used to represent the victory of the Raj. Felice Beato, a photographic veteran of the Crimean campaigns, developed the set-up directorial shot, passed off as objective reportage.
His iconic photographs of the bombed out Secundra Bagh at Lucknow, the courtyard littered with skeletons, was entirely a staged reconstruction. In the 1860s, a different direction was struck: the decade was dominated by the work of Samuel Bourne, a Nottingham bank clerk who came to India in 1863 and during his seven years there developed into perhaps the greatest exponent of landscape photography in India.
More generally, for Dehejia the period between 1840-1911, when the "professional" reigned supreme, and the field was dominated by a few individual masters such as Bourne, was the "golden age" of photography in India. This came to an end, in her account, with the arrival of the Kodak box camera ("You press the button, we do the rest"): photography now became a demotic art, with the family portrait or snapshot replacing the higher themes of the golden age. Dehejia implies that photography in India was to remain in this "domain of the commonplace" until at least the 1970s, when again it gained an aesthetic quality that could give it a wider significance. But such a dichotomy, between an early golden age followed by a long and only recently ended dark age, is hardly useful in trying to understand the development of photography in India.
The curatorial, descriptive emphases and choices favoured in these two books provide no convincing principles by which to structure a more internal history of the medium in India. Nor is any adequate critical vocabulary visible: Dehejia, a reader of Susan Sontag, is not unaware of this problem (she rightly notes that "it is curious that the vocabulary of photographic criticism remains as meagre as it is. When it moves away from language close to that used to evaluate paintings — composition, lighting, focus and clarity — it uses inexact terms such as subtle, powerful, complex, or simple) but leaves matters at that."
The question remains as to whether the work in these catalogues is to be seen as part of a continuous history of photographic images in India, or as an extension of the history of European photography. Falconer refers to the "largely secret history of Indian photography" that still remains to be written. In fact what these fine photographs suggest is that it is time to move away from this approach towards a more integrated account. Such an account — which would avoid contrasting Indian and European "ways of seeing" — might turn out to be truer both to the national experience and the larger history of this most international art.
India through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911, Vidya Dehejia et al, Mapin Publishing, p.315.
India: Pioneering Photographers 1850-1900, John Falconer, The British Library, p.144.
@ Sunil Khilnani
First published in the Times Literary Supplement, February 8, 2002.
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