A note on the Charminar photograph

In response to readers questioning the authenticity of the photograph used with the report “As protests roil Charminar, Hyderabad’s heritage slowly vanishes”, we now present more photographs from “The Hindu” archives showing the Charminar before the construction of the Bhagya Laxmi temple.

Many readers have written in to ask about the old photograph of Charminar published in The Hindu on November 21, 2012 in the report > As protests roil Charminar, Hyderabad’s heritage slowly vanishes , saying that it looks more like a painting. In fact, it is a B&W photograph that was colour-touched by a studio in Hyderabad — a common practice in the pre-colour photography era.

Before publishing the photograph, The Hindu independently verified its authenticity with another untouched copy of the same photo. Since permission to publish the untouched B&W photo was not available, we used the coloured copy.

We are now able to present four additional photographs from The Hindu’s own archives that confirm the temple is a recent structure. Two photographs — one shot in 1957 and the other in 1962 — show no temple structure. The 1990 photo with the policemen in the foreground has the temple structure and the same can be seen in the 1994 picture as well.

To view a 1986 photograph, which also shows the temple, please visit the following link of the Aga Khan Visual Archive, MIT Libraries’ collections, United States. >http://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/22104/112253_cp.jpg?sequence=1