An isle, more from without than from within

‘Imaging the Isle Across’ is the title both of a book and of an impressive exhibition of ‘vintage photography from Ceylon’ that was shown in the National Museum in Delhi from September 26 to November 11. The exhibition was curated by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and most of the photographs came from its extensive collections.

The Alkazi Foundation is the brainchild of Ebrahim Alkazi, a successful theatre director, now in his ninetieth year, who in later life became an art collector and gallery owner. Amongst other things, the Foundation administers the Alkazi Collection of Photography. This is housed in archives in Delhi, London and New York and holds almost 100,000 photographic images of South and Southeast Asia from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Such collections are inevitably the result of a singular obsession and we should be grateful to Mr. Alkazi, not only for the scope of his collecting, but also for his diligence in restoring and cataloguing the photographs and for placing them in the public realm. Were it not for the activities of such collectors, many valuable images would be lost. But we should also record a passing regret that such a wealth of images of Ceylon should reside in India, and that no equivalent public archive exists in Sri Lanka. In like fashion, whilst we can applaud the staging of such an exhibition in Delhi, we should bemoan the fact that no plans exist for it to travel to Colombo.

The book is not a catalogue of the exhibition, but rather a collection of related essays. Of the four main essays, only one is by a Sri Lankan, Ismeth Raheem, while the other three exhibit varying degrees of detachment from their subject.

The title of the book is centred on the word ‘Isle’ and implies an external view of an insular possession. Of course Sri Lanka is an island, but it is a large one and seems to be less of an ‘isle’ to the people who live in it than to those who look at it from across the Palk Strait. This viewpoint is reinforced by a twice-quoted paragraph, describing ‘a little island, a pendant that nestles gently on the swelling bosom of the Indian Ocean’ that comes from the ‘Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller’ and was written – perhaps with irony - in 1974, not by some 19th century European traveller, but by Nihal Fernando, an important Sri Lankan photographer of the post-independence period

This sense of detachment is reinforced in the introduction where Rahaab Allama refers to Kandy as a thriving coastal town, and by Jennifer Chowdhry Biswas who compares Sri Lanka and Kashmir, both ‘frontier regions’ of India.

Biswas’s essay, ‘A Landscape of Desire’, seems particularly dislocated. Her description of ‘the imperceptible changes in topography’ wrought by the plantations industry totally ignores the massive and rapid transformations that occurred during the 19th C. Her accounts of the development of Colombo and Kandy fail to differentiate between the distinctive origins and trajectories of the two towns. In describing Colombo she pays insufficient attention to the spatial implications of the three succeeding colonial hegemonies and she overplays the significance of Kandy during the colonial period. Kandy was not, as she suggests, the starting point for railway journeys to the Ancient Cities, but was situated on a branch of the line that was built to serve the tea country, while the line to the north from the Polgahawela Junction was only established some forty years later.

Ayesha Matthan in her invaluable essay ‘Lens Upon Islanders’ offers an interesting analysis of the photographs of ‘native types’ that were sold by the commercial studios, reminding us that the subjects were invariably posed and ‘dressed-up’ in order to provide a sanitised or ‘pseudo-ethnographic’ version of the exotic. She also draws attention to the way in which countless photographs of the plantation industry serve, inadvertently, as a catalogue of servitude and cruel exploitation.

The most significant section of the book is the title essay by Ismeth Raheem. Raheem is already the author of two seminal books on the 19th C. photography of Sri Lanka: ‘Images of British Ceylon’ (2000) and ‘Archaeology and Photography’ (2009). In the former he charted the rise of the private studios from the 1860s onwards, including detailed accounts of the work of the Skeens, Charles Scowan and A.W. Platé. In the latter he focussed on the photography that accompanied the Archaeological Survey and the work of Joseph Lawton.

In his present essay Raheem begins by summarising the results of his earlier researches. He clearly identifies the role of these pioneering photographers as ‘inventorial’, in so far as they were operating in the footsteps of early map-makers and topographical artists in cataloguing the spoils of Empire. They were, without exception, European. One advertisement from the Platé Studio boasts ’European artists in attendance’ and adds ‘Man spricht Deutch’ (sic) and ‘On parle français’.

The early photographers were itinerant opportunists intent on making a living out of a new and rapidly evolving technology. Their clients, in the first instance, were travellers and colonists who wanted portable images of Sri Lanka and a public in Britain eager for views of foreign dominions. Later some photographers put down roots and catered to the demands both of foreign visitors, the expatriate British and a burgeoning Sri Lankan middle class.

Raheem interestingly singles out three important women photographers: Madame Del Tufo, who, apart from her commercial work, produced detailed studies of Colombo houses; Julia Margaret Cameron, who was one of the pioneers of Victorian portrait photography, but by happen-chance spent her twilight years on the banks of the Kalu Ganga at a time when her career as a photographer was all but over; Ethel Partridge, who was the first wife of Ananda Coomaraswamy and made the marvellous plates that illustrate his book ‘Medieval Sinhalese Art’, though the first edition makes no mention of her, while the second edition, which appeared after her death, offers an elliptic dedication to ‘E.M.C’, referring presumably to Ethel Mairet Coomaraswamy, Mairet being the name of her second husband.

Finally, Raheem offers a special tribute to Lionel Wendt (1900-1944), a handful of whose photographs, from the Sansoni collection, figure in the exhibition. Wendt was a Dutch Burgher or, to use a term that Raheem has coined in another context, one of the ‘people in-between’. And yet there can be no doubt that he was born in Ceylon, spoke fluent Sinhala and regarded himself as wholly Ceylonese. As such he can be regarded as Sri Lanka’s first native photographer. But more than this he can also be regarded as one of the leading experimental photographers of his day and an important catalyst of a nascent contemporary art movement in Sri Lanka.

With much justification, Raheem identifies Wendt as part-author of the famous 1934 film ‘Song of Ceylon’, although it is generally attributed by European historians of the cinema as the exclusive work of British director Basil Wright. It is high-time that Wendt’s contribution to the making and editing of this important film is properly acknowledged.

Wendt is generally remembered today for his homoerotic male nudes, but these form only a small part of his oeuvre. His work as a topographic photographer and his careful studies of everyday life in rural Ceylon also deserves recognition. Unfortunately, however, Wendt scholarship is hampered by the absence of any accessible archive of his work.

The book offers a tantalising glimpse into what is an important collection of photographs and one hopes that it will become generally available. While many of the images are beautifully reproduced, the persistent use of distorted scans of open books is an unfortunate gimmick which has no place in a publication of this significance.