DAG exhibition maps the advent and impact of photography in colonial India

In October 2023, DAG hosted Delhi Durbar: Empire, Display, and the Possession of History, an exhibition that traced the status of Delhi as a seat of power through three mass assemblies that took place after the Revolt of 1857 until 1911. That show featured three rare images by Beato, a commercial war photographer of the 19th century, who arrived in India in 1858 and recorded the aftermath of the Revolt; his photographs reflected the quietude of Delhi and the outskirts, nearly devoid of people, that told us of how the British had stamped out the Revolt, leading to forced evacuations from major cities.

Fast forward to today, and it’s clear that Beato’s images, and DAG’s exhibitions, are speaking to each other to unpack a complicated history of India and to make space for multiple meanings. Their latest, Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments 1855 ̶1920, takes us deep into the DAG archive of early photographs of Indian monuments taken during the latter half of the 19th century, and explores the connected histories of photography and field surveys of colonial India, to highlight the overlapping domains of colonialism, science and scholarship.

Leading the charge is the guest curator Sudeshna Guha, former curatorial manager and research associate of the photographic collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge; she currently teaches at the Department of History and Archaeology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. She has selected an array of images, and different objects that were created through photographic technology, such as paper and glass negatives; collotype, albumen, and silver gelatin prints; lavish albums that were gifted and collected as souvenirs; lithographs; stereographs; cartes-de-visite, cabinet cards, and some of the earliest postcards of Indian monuments.

“Through the course of my career, I have looked at photographs as objects, and have thought about how they make history; how photographs accrue multiple meanings at various times of viewing because photographs create a historical context. The DAG photography archives are vast and with this exhibition, my aims were two-fold: first, to show how photographs are great things to think with; and how photography literally created a discipline of archaeology, by allowing archaeologists to show systematic recordings. The architectural surveys of India, which were the archaeological explorations, took these photographs of monuments that later became the monuments driving tourism and the heritage project,” said Guha.

Photography was launched in 1839 in France and Britain, Guha writes in the companion book to the exhibition, and within months, arrived in India. The exhibition begins with a short curatorial note that tells us that the colonial government quickly established photography as “the pencil of nature”, and a more valuable form than paintings, which were not as objective or accurate.

The photographs are displayed chronologically, starting with “Hullabeed, The Great Temple, 1856” by William Henry Pigou, and “Purudkul, the Great Sivite Temple, 1855” by Thomas Biggs, moving on to the works of commercial photographers such as William Johnson and William Henderson’s images of the Elephanta Caves and the Shiva temple of Ambernath in Kalyan, until we arrive at the section showcasing the work of Linneaus Tripe.

Arriving in India in 1839 at the age of 17, Tripe was a soldier in the Madras regiment of the East India Company army before he began practising photography in the late 1840s. By 1857, he was appointed photographer of the Madras Presidency — and along with Beato’s panoramic views, and Eugene C Impey’s photographs of the Qutub Minar — his photographs of the Minakshi Sundareshvara Temple in Madurai are some of the highlights of the exhibition.

A section of the exhibition dedicated to field photography focuses on what Guha calls the “techno-materiality” of the photograph. For example, James Waterhouse, a former soldier with the Royal Bengal Artillery, was tasked with taking photographs of people and places in Central India; he documented some of the earliest images of the Sanchi Stupa in 1860-62. “He had to experiment with photography in the field, creating chemicals, working with the weather and light, depending on the administration of the area to get around. All of these conditions impacted the photographs and the histories they tell,” said Guha.

It’s easy to talk about the colonial gaze when we look at these images, said Guha, but that takes away agency from the Indians who practised photography. “In the beginning, officers of the East India Company were deputed to take photographs to list the Indian monuments. Soon, it was a commercial business too, with British, European and Indian operators. The British thought that photography would be a cure for the representational ills of the paintings that came before, but the Indians did exactly what they wanted to do with the camera,” Guha said.

She added: “The British considered photography to be a scientific pursuit and amateur photographic societies began to emerge all over the country; natives and women were allowed to participate. This became a great leveller. The gaze, therefore, cannot be reduced to native/Indian, or colonial/British — people were taking photographs because it became a means of livelihood. And we don’t know the history or the economics of the street photographers of that time, we only know of Bourne and Shepherd or Lala Deen Dayal because they were successful”.

Dayal, a surveyor and an estimator in the Public Works Department, where led by Sir Lepel Henry Griffin, the department focused on the preservation of monuments. He began taking photographs in 1878 and transitioned into being a professional photographer, producing approximately 500 images a year. His travels, facilitated by his work and later, his connections with British and Indian elites, took him around the country; on display at DAG are his photographs from Ajanta and Ellora, Daulatabad, Bharatpur, Sanchi and more.

The photographers at the time were recreating visual memories of events they were not present at, and monuments that pre-dated photography. “Tripe took photographs to tell the world that the British had been good for India, which was a completely colonial stance. But then you also have Narayan Virkar, who recreates the grandeur of Shivaji and the Maratha empire with his photographs of the Raigadh Fort,” said Guha. With parts of the fort appearing to be carved into the hills and Shivaji’s Samathi (Samadhi) rising above the rugged Deccan Plateau, the photographs convey a sense of everlasting power, telling viewers the story that Virkar wants them to remember. “And he succeeded in doing so by using the British trope of the picturesque and making it his own,” said Guha.

Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments 1855 ̶ 1920 is on at DAG till October 12