An image of a gloriously green and immaculately lawned Lal Bagh, with a stately horse-drawn carriage; bullock-pulled carriages struggling through 19th century monsoon-flooded Madras; an idyllic view of Madras harbour. These are among the postcards that have been put up on Instagram by the organisers of ‘From Madras to Bangalore: Picture Postcards as Urban History of Colonial India’, an ongoing exhibition at London’s SOAS University. It tries to capture life in the two colonial cities between the 1900s and the 1930s through the postcards that were created and sent during this period.
It was a period when postcards — a relatively new means of communication — were all the rage, being cheap, and used extensively by middle-class European residents in India to give family and friends abroad a glimpse of their lives, as well as by Indians internally.
Beyond nostalgia: ‘Our Baker’, Madras.
The collection brings together nearly two decades of collecting by Stephen Putnam Hughes and Emily Stevenson of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS. “They were something akin to the Instagram of the early 20th century,” as the panel says.
The curators believe the value of photographs in understanding the colonial period has been greatly underestimated, and instead of simply being seen as scraps of “colonial nostalgia,” they need to be recognised as documents offering an insight into life in the cities and into the mindset of the people who posed for them, created and sent them.
To and fro
The collection brings together two separate projects, demonstrating curious
parallels that surprised the curators. One tends to think of a handful of photographers operating in each city but in reality there were large numbers. Around 40 are behind the photographs in the collection, says Hughes, adding that there was considerable exchange of work and connections between Madras and Bangalore then.
Fruit-seller, Bangalore
The photographers too represented a far wider range of backgrounds than might have been anticipated. “There were European studios employing Indians, Indians employing European photographers… we tend to think of India as just being ruled by the British and connected to them, but in reality it was a melting pot for people from all over Europe,” says Hughes, noting the considerable number of Italians and Germans involved in the Madras and Bangalore photography scenes.
In many cases, photos taken in India were produced and finished in studios all over Europe before returning to India to be sold, highlighting the global nature of the flourishing postcard industry. Stylistically, too, there was a lot of commonality — there’s no easy way of distinguishing between the work of Indian and European photographers, which meant that techniques were shared and assimilated across the photographic community.
Some of these postcards can be found in India, but much of the collection on display came from Britain.
‘Master’s Whiskey’, Madras
“These were family memorabilia and sat in the lofts for many years.” The collection includes a touching series of 120 postcards sent by an aunt to her niece in England between 1912 and 1919. The aunt meticulously helped the niece build up her collection of different scenes of life.
A different spin
The fact that Indian photographers were behind many of these pictorial representations puts a different spin on the images. “What looks to be a straightforward colonial representation of British India — a glorification of the Raj — also starts to look a bit different when you realise that Indians are part of the production,” notes Hughes, pointing in particular to the “Masters” series by Higginbotham & Co, meant to deliver “humorous” commentary on the relationship between master and servants and at the same time play on insecurities about what servants were up to when “the masters” weren’t there. In staged scenes, servants mimic their masters: one is slumped next to a bottle of whisky, another is lounging with his feet up in the air, akin to a modern-day meme, the exhibition observes.
Lubbay Masjid, Bangalore.
While some broke with tradition, many — particularly those displaying “natives” — fell into typologies that went down well with the largely European audiences.
They categorised people by their “generic social types” that represented their “otherness”, the exhibition notes. It also points to the use of the word “our” to refer to individuals (such as “our baker” in one image). “This addresses the anticipated postcard recipient as part of the ruling class in the British Empire and implies an entitled sense of possession of Indian servants.
For Europeans not accustomed to having servants back home these postcards allowed them to perform a higher class status in the context of British India,” explains an exhibition panel. “It is a reminder of colonial privilege afforded to those in British India which they wouldn’t have had outside it,” says Hughes.
The exhibition does not shy away from difficult, potentially offensive, topics, showing colonial prejudices in full. One postcard series, the ‘Madras Hunt’, shows a line of children and women, staged to suggest they are delousing one another. Variations of the “hunt” theme were particularly commercially successful in both cities. “This series is provocative and demeaning. As curators, we have debated among ourselves whether to include them,” says the exhibition panel.
However, these images are only a part of a huge array — from bustling street scenes to landscapes that portray the cities as lush paradises. “The sheer quantity of the material is astounding… we are flooded with thousands of images of both cities that defy patterns and stereotypes,” says Hughes.
He hopes the exhibition will leave the viewer with a willingness to question one’s assumptions of what life was like in colonial-era Madras and Bangalore.
Many of the postcards are available on Instagram (including for those without an Instagram login), with details of the pictures and the photographers who took them. The organisers are in talks to bring the exhibition to India.
ON SHOW: ‘From Madras to Bangalore: Picture Postcards as Urban History of Colonial India’, Brunei Gallery: Exhibition Rooms, SOAS, till September 23.
