Enduring images
Rare archival images by some of the best lensmen of the time present almost 200 years of visual documentation and history to become a valuable resource in the emerging discourse around photography.
IT took the art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha half a decade and more to complete her tour de force, The Archival Gaze, and its companion volume of essays, Points of View: Defining Moments of Photography in India. The book, finalised during the pandemic, is the product of substantial research into timelines, notes, and choice of images. Tracing the “historical, aesthetic and technical aspects of Indian documentary, artistic and news photography” and its “movement from the salon to the gallery, and from the newspaper column to the curated exhibition” (p. 7), the elegantly designed book, for the most part, succeeds in its daunting mandate. The text interleaved with rare archival photographs that maintain the integrity of their original colour and sharpness seamlessly takes the reader-viewer through the years.
ABIDING TROPE
The first decades of the camera in India saw the emergence of the photo studio, the arrival of itinerant photographers from abroad, and the memorialising of 1857 by Felice Beato and others. Perhaps one of the earliest war photographers, Beato used the new medium with ease, reconstructing the past as one would a set for a dramatic performance, with human remains as gory props. The photographic frame doubling as a stage became an abiding trope in early photography, and though Sinha does not deal much with the fascinating subject of surreal painted backdrops, these together with elaborately posed images, such as the photograph of a Mogul father with his children, often had a dream sequence-like quality about them.
If studios created illusions, folios of the “Views of India” genre represented in realistic detail the architecture and natural beauty of the country. Practitioners in this growing genre were the Scottish doctor
John Murray, Abbas Ali, John Edward Sache, William Baker, and John Burke in northern India; Samuel Bourne (a crass imperialist, he was to set up the well-known Bourne & Shepherd studios in Shimla and Calcutta); Linaeus Tripe in the Madras Presidency; and Lala (later Raja) Deen Dayal in Secunderabad and Bombay. Sinha details the rapidly changing technologies around the camera and photographic processes; methods and techniques were often discussed in the newly founded photographic societies in Bombay and Calcutta. Indian members, such as the brothers Bhau and Narayan Dajee, both photographers in Bombay, and the antiquarian Rajendralala Mitra in Calcutta, were active participants.
The beginning of the 20th century “marked the nascent phase of photojournalism in India”, and crowd photographs in newspapers “challenged the images of passive inaction” as represented in statesponsored ethnographic photographs of Indian types such as Lord Canning’s massive project The People of India of the 1860s (p. 107). Throughout the book, Sinha reveals interesting nuggets of information such as the membership of a Miss C. Sorabjee in Journal of the Photographic Society, the only known woman member. Could this be Cornelia Sorabjee, who, in 1897, was the first Indian woman to qualify as a lawyer?
Soon, Eastman Kodak’s Brownie was to democratise photography, and as it was focussing on women as consumers, the camera was “marketed enthusiastically to this particular demographic” (p. 113). Formal studio photography had to increasingly contend with the domestic camera as a shutter-happy population, albeit a small number, clicked the ubiquitous family photograph. A certain individual professionalism was round the corner; Umrao Singh Sher-gil bought expensive equipment to experiment with double exposures and mise en scenes with his photogenic daughters—amrita and Indira—as models. At a more public level, the photograph was used extensively by the state as evidence and counterevidence. After the Jallianwala massacre of 1919, the rulers produced an album of photographs as a counter narrative to rising nationalist fervour in which the images taken by the well-known Bombay
photographer Narayan Vinayak Virkar of survivors pointing to a bullet-riddled wall against which many people died played an important role. Sinha deals with the British attempts to protect the notorious General Reginald Dyer, juxtaposing this with one of Virkar’s images; however, she does not discuss how the state and others were soon to use photographs as active agents of their different agendas. That this oppositional role of the photograph, particularly through the popular media, was to steadily gain momentum became clear with the emergence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in nationalistic politics. In spite of the passing of the Rowlatt Act, which placed limitations on the press, leading newspapers covered the Non-cooperation Movement and the Dandi Salt March.
Soon, images of the Mahatma were widely available as was the photograph (it remains iconic even
today) of the revolutionary leader Bhagat Singh in a trilby (p. 144).
PHOTOGRAPHER AS ARTIST
In 1932, the setting up of Camera Pictorialists in Bombay helped to further institutionalise photographic practice, and its sponsorship of the All India Salon on Photographic Art emphasised the role of the photographer as artist, an idea that grew from the Pictorialist tradition earlier in the century. Around the same time, in Bengal, Calcuttabased Annapurna Datta became the first individual woman photographer to make a living through her camera, and though Sinha has not shared images from their large body of work, the twin sisters Manobina and Debalina Sen Roy were soon imaginatively refashioning the childhood and the family portrait.
Photographing public spaces, such as Shambhu Saha’s images of Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan
or Pranlal Patel’s street photography, became popular. The Jyoti Sangh, founded by the Gandhian Mridula Sarabai, commissioned Pranlal Patel to document its work, an indication of nascent attempts to use photographs to create institutional histories. Similarly, Kanu Gandhi was documenting everyday life at Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram and memorialising his uncle through unusual frames and camera angles. It was also a time when “as freedom became inevitable, the nature of photography for Indians, a colonised people, was to change permanently” (p. 165).
The 1940s brought freedom, but it also saw the Bengal Famine of 1943, the untold bloodshed and destruction of Partition, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Sunil Janah’s photographs of the famine and of tribal India are among the most compelling images of the times, and soon, Margaret Bourke-white,