THE BIG INDIA PICTURE
As they move from the tripod to the selfie, two new volumes shed much light on the practice of Indian photography and theories that have informed it
These twinned volumes are intended as a comprehensive overview of Indian photography from the inception of the medium to our current time. In this they succeed, covering the subject like those large black drapes covering both photographer and view camera. As with the drapes, there are holes and pinpricks, but these don’t interfere with the larger picture.
The Points of View volume comprises an introduction and 15 essays, all copiously illustrated, that examine different situations through which photography arrived and spread in the subcontinent, creating an ecosystem of imagery that was globally recognisable yet completely unique. As Gayatri Sinha argues in her introduction, the aim is not encyclopaedic but rather to ask the question: “...does photography (in India) enable new relationships, both mediatic and cultural, and create new generative capacities?”
The Archival Gaze volume is meant to be read side by side with its sibling and it works differently: opening it, you are plunged into a procession of images that is chronological but not strictly so; alongside, the text takes us through 1840–2020 in sections of two decades, marking important events in the development and diversification of photography in the region. There are many more large reproductions here, and the invitation is to look first, moving back and forth between different photographs, and to search for the textual moorings later. Through these books you can explore the riverine progression of light-based image making its way across the land. The large tripoded contraption is first seen being used by a few Europeans in the mid-19th century; soon, a couple of Maharajahs have procured the elaborate paraphernalia and become highly skilled exponents; by the end of the 19th century a wide assortment of the bourgeoisie is using the medium for all sorts of purposes. Across this period, a certain ‘India’ begins to be produced—visually manufactured—by gora and native photographers: ancient buildings, ruins, sculptures and artefacts, landscapes, portraits of royalty and commoners, objects of daily use, all of these made somehow more ‘real’ by being rendered in monochromatic frames. Through this, a certain composite portrait, an Orientalist identikit of India and Indian culture coalesces for the world; and this is then glanced back to those Indians who have access to photographs and photo-books. As the essays lay out, the image traffic is hardly one-way: while the subcontinent
sucks in the medium’s developments, its refracting processors push out to the world very different kinds of photography and ways of reading and using photographs than is found elsewhere. As Rahab Allana writes in his essay, “Photography from the Indian subcontinent has challenged and transformed both the general and specialist reception of this dynamic medium over the past 150 years.” The 20th century sees photography branch out crazily, not least in what Allana calls ‘image deployment and viewership’, forming jugalbandis with all sorts of projects—from the production of fictional and mythological images to the nationalist movement, i.e. the creation of the nation itself. The late 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st see a further diversification, bringing us to both the ubiquitous selfie/ Insta era and the bohurupiya photo-based image popping up in every quadrant of the art world.
A photographer friend once described a gathering of fellow practitioners as ‘a quibble of photographers’, so it is unavoidable that these twin slabs, beautifully conceived and produced as they are, raise some push and pull of aperture. The ability of a photograph to mean totally different things to different people kicks up again when you read about “a striking image of a wealthy man seated in a rickshaw being pulled by an impoverished rickshaw puller”: looking at the described photograph by William Gedney, most people from Calcutta would see a riksha-walla hauling a lower-middle class babu. At a deeper level, it seems quite a conceptual stretch when a scholar tries to corral Sheba Chhachhi’s powerful, multilayered work Winged Pilgrims and her monumental Temporal Twist into a ‘queer optic’.
If there is one essay or recounting missing from the book, it is about how the sheer scarcity and expense of imported photographic material between 1950 and 1990 directly affected the way people made photographs in India. (Gedney, we are told, comes to Banaras in 1970 and exposes 350 rolls of film in about 18 months—more than many Indian photographers would have exposed in their entire careers).
A typical quandary for overview volumes of this type is that with Partition, the practices in the neighbouring countries, (anyway totally absent vis-a-vis Ceylon/ Sri Lanka and Nepal) Pakistan and Bangladesh, become invisible, shrinking a subcontinental study of over 100 years to a national one for the past 75.
Finally, as intended, these volumes are indeed indispensable for the understanding of photography in India, but at Rs 9,400 for the pair, they are sadly completely beyond the reach of any ordinary scholar or photographer. ■