1 00:00:03,720 --> 00:00:10,980 Well, thank you, Cora, for that introduction. And thank you, Geoff, for inviting me today and for forgiving, 2 00:00:11,050 --> 00:00:18,100 for directing me towards some material to work on which some of you may recognise from the exhibition. 3 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:26,260 So this talk is going to briefly sketch three episodes of Indian engagement with early photography, 4 00:00:26,260 --> 00:00:35,650 and I'm going to elaborate on some of the ways that these engagements were perceived and then sometimes also managed by the colonial British. 5 00:00:36,460 --> 00:00:40,450 Photography is the conference title states was a new power, 6 00:00:41,080 --> 00:00:46,840 but what was the nature of this power when it came to the governance of Britain's most prized imperial possession? 7 00:00:46,840 --> 00:00:54,040 India power, of course, operates in diverse ways, sometimes subtle and collaborative, 8 00:00:54,280 --> 00:01:02,230 and other times coercive, exclusionary and violent photography flickered across all such force fields. 9 00:01:02,770 --> 00:01:08,020 How it was viewed and its perceived benefits or threats very much depended on 10 00:01:08,020 --> 00:01:13,270 the political context in which the technology was used and viewed so broadly. 11 00:01:13,630 --> 00:01:20,470 I want to see how Anglo-Indian photographic encounters played out in frameworks of war and peace. 12 00:01:20,830 --> 00:01:27,430 Although these were not so neatly separable as it might appear in the case of British colonialism to begin then, 13 00:01:27,790 --> 00:01:31,330 with one of the earliest Indian encounters with with photography, 14 00:01:31,810 --> 00:01:35,350 in the same year that the daguerreotype process was announced to the world, 15 00:01:35,350 --> 00:01:45,130 in Europe to Indian naval architects working for the East India Company, Jehangeer Nowrojee (no-row-gee) and his nephew, Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee arrived in Britain. 16 00:01:45,880 --> 00:01:51,490 Their purpose was to torch numerous shipyards and arsenals and to receive some training in chess. 17 00:01:51,490 --> 00:01:55,390 Then it overrule the published account of their trip. 18 00:01:55,420 --> 00:02:00,580 Now on show talks, not so much on their work as engineers, 19 00:02:00,730 --> 00:02:07,150 but on their engagement with an early Victorian culture of visual spectacle Madame Tussauds, 20 00:02:07,420 --> 00:02:11,980 the theatre, Vauxhall Gardens, dioramas and so on and so forth. 21 00:02:13,030 --> 00:02:18,550 When the Indian pair attended a special talk on how to make daguerreotypes at the Royal Institution in London, 22 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:25,930 the lecture occurred in conjunction with a small exhibit of colonial commodities and technologies, 23 00:02:26,080 --> 00:02:34,209 a glass case display celebrating the versatility of Indian rubber, showing both the raw gum and some of its resulting products. 24 00:02:34,210 --> 00:02:38,020 And these ranged from everything from from tools of war to luxury commodities. 25 00:02:38,200 --> 00:02:45,760 This isn't the exact display they saw, but it gives you an idea of the kind of thing that was was on exhibit around this time. 26 00:02:47,470 --> 00:02:55,780 The camera thus entered a British culture of display that rendered the products of empire into a spectacle of power and prosperity. 27 00:02:56,690 --> 00:03:04,590 More specifically, the Indian pair encountered photography in terms of a broader mid-century exhibition area complex. 28 00:03:04,610 --> 00:03:12,170 To use Tony Bennett's term, that encompassed everything from art to scientific instruments and industrial machines. 29 00:03:13,010 --> 00:03:18,319 The exhibition re complex privileged site as an educational and indeed disciplinary 30 00:03:18,320 --> 00:03:23,720 tool and had developed in earnest in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century. 31 00:03:24,080 --> 00:03:28,730 The great exhibition of 1851 was its triumphal expression. 32 00:03:29,930 --> 00:03:38,780 It was predicated on the transfer of objects from private collections into public arenas where they could be seen as expressions of national wealth. 33 00:03:39,530 --> 00:03:44,540 The public display of this kind of material helped to foster citizenship. 34 00:03:44,650 --> 00:03:53,780 Although this, anyway, is Bennett's argument enabling the British to identify it with the power of the modern state. 35 00:03:55,410 --> 00:04:02,100 Numerous art historians have also noted the utility of the exhibition complex for the British in 36 00:04:02,100 --> 00:04:08,490 presenting the Empire in a positive light as an enterprise rooted in technological progress, 37 00:04:08,670 --> 00:04:13,739 rationality and the cultivation of taste. Daniel Rycroft, for one, 38 00:04:13,740 --> 00:04:19,290 has shown how the collaborative nature of imperial power in India was indicated to the British public 39 00:04:19,470 --> 00:04:25,380 in the 1840s and fifties by a newspaper illustration such as the one you see here on the left, 40 00:04:25,620 --> 00:04:33,360 which would show Indian elites participating in the sophisticated spectatorship fostered by shows like The Great Exhibition. 41 00:04:34,390 --> 00:04:42,520 A number of British depictions of the Great Exhibition showed South Asian visitors incorporated into these edifying viewing practices, 42 00:04:42,910 --> 00:04:46,840 strolling around the display courts alongside British spectators. 43 00:04:47,620 --> 00:04:54,819 Exhibitions in this vein proliferated throughout the British Empire, including India, as, for example, 44 00:04:54,820 --> 00:05:01,600 at the Madras Exhibition of 1855, which included everything from photography to military engineering. 45 00:05:02,980 --> 00:05:08,889 So this is a historical moment in which certain members of Indian elites were being courted as 46 00:05:08,890 --> 00:05:15,130 part of a common imperial project through the shared visual experience of technological modernity. 47 00:05:16,210 --> 00:05:21,160 Upon first seeing the Daguerreotypes at the Gallery of Practical Science Narrative mere one, 48 00:05:21,160 --> 00:05:25,510 she duly proclaimed it the most extraordinary production of modern times. 49 00:05:26,800 --> 00:05:32,560 What is interesting about their account is how, in many ways photography is not really privileged. 50 00:05:32,710 --> 00:05:37,600 It's merely one among many modern objects of interest which they see on display in Britain. 51 00:05:38,320 --> 00:05:48,790 For example, in that same gallery on that same evening, they see another item that potentially revealed a much darker side to imperial modernity, 52 00:05:49,270 --> 00:05:54,970 a steam gun that claimed to show forth bullets more than 160 every minute. 53 00:05:55,010 --> 00:05:57,580 And thank you, Jeff, for showing me this image. 54 00:05:59,420 --> 00:06:09,140 Now, actually, even as the pair describe the the the deadly potential of this kind of gun, they mobilise the rhetoric of peace. 55 00:06:09,830 --> 00:06:14,000 Such an invention, they say, would go far towards putting an end to war. 56 00:06:14,870 --> 00:06:20,990 But whether this kind of pacification was to be to the benefit of the British was left somewhat ambiguous. 57 00:06:21,770 --> 00:06:25,730 The strong man will then no longer be able to tyrannised over the weak, they claim. 58 00:06:26,390 --> 00:06:28,320 And then they go on to the day to day delivery. 59 00:06:28,330 --> 00:06:34,550 Delineate delineates the particular implications for the naval force upon which the British Empire was built. 60 00:06:35,150 --> 00:06:42,740 I quote ships which present attack forts almost with a certainty of success would by well-appointed steam gun 61 00:06:43,010 --> 00:06:48,950 have their decks swept of their men and they themselves would be perforated through and through and be sunk. 62 00:06:50,810 --> 00:06:55,250 So is this then an Indian fantasy at the end of Britain's naval supremacy? 63 00:06:56,150 --> 00:07:03,920 Well, maybe. But the more mundane answer, I think, is that it's a professional concern of theirs with the future of their craft as naval architects. 64 00:07:04,160 --> 00:07:10,670 The family had worked for the East India Company for generations. The tone of their account is not anti-colonial. 65 00:07:11,210 --> 00:07:17,150 In many ways, it is a play on to the exhibition complex, of which photography was now a part. 66 00:07:17,960 --> 00:07:22,820 Whether it was weaponry, photography or commodities that they encountered, 67 00:07:23,360 --> 00:07:29,780 they would stress the admiration for the institutions that facilitated those sorts of displays. 68 00:07:30,740 --> 00:07:36,830 The publication of such a narrative attested to a British power operating via cultural hegemony, 69 00:07:37,310 --> 00:07:40,730 whereby Indian elites were interpolated as imperial subjects, 70 00:07:40,730 --> 00:07:49,280 sharing certain values and norms with colonial elites, enabling a form of rule predicated supposedly on consent. 71 00:07:51,320 --> 00:08:02,300 So I want to turn now to India itself and consider photography's troubled relationship to this collaborative ideal of imperial power. 72 00:08:03,480 --> 00:08:09,870 Colonial photography has often been written about in terms of a crude imposition of subject object relations with the camera, 73 00:08:09,870 --> 00:08:16,650 shoring up an epistemological divide between Britain and India, the former documenting and classifying the latter. 74 00:08:17,700 --> 00:08:22,799 Yet this story of colonial epistemological privilege obscures the extent to which Indians were. 75 00:08:22,800 --> 00:08:26,580 The agents of early photography are not merely its objects. 76 00:08:27,650 --> 00:08:31,910 When the Photographic Society of Bengal was founded in Calcutta in 1856, 77 00:08:31,910 --> 00:08:36,830 it consisted of both British and Indian members, a fact which they noted proudly. 78 00:08:37,490 --> 00:08:41,810 Indian members gave oversea papers and presented images for consideration. 79 00:08:42,320 --> 00:08:48,680 There were 348 Indian visitors during the opening week of the society's first photographic exhibition in March, 80 00:08:48,920 --> 00:08:53,749 at which at least one Indian photographer was represented. In many ways, 81 00:08:53,750 --> 00:08:57,500 the society was a model of the kind of colonial relations that the British had been 82 00:08:57,500 --> 00:09:01,550 trying to promote through the Agency of World's fairs like the Great Exhibition. 83 00:09:02,930 --> 00:09:06,920 But within a year, not a single Indian member remained. 84 00:09:08,140 --> 00:09:09,190 So what has happened? 85 00:09:10,350 --> 00:09:19,140 In May 1857, a rebellion of Indian soldiers against their British commanders had spread into a widespread uprising against British rule. 86 00:09:19,470 --> 00:09:29,459 What was called then the Indian mutiny. This radical shift in context from peace to war led to a crisis at the society with comforting 87 00:09:29,460 --> 00:09:35,280 narratives about the empire as a co-operative endeavour quickly coming under significant strain. 88 00:09:36,100 --> 00:09:42,850 Calcutta itself, where the photographic society was based, remained relatively securely under British control. 89 00:09:43,480 --> 00:09:50,800 But as insurrectionary violence spread through the northern regions of India and threatened to mark the end of British rule in the region, 90 00:09:51,130 --> 00:09:57,070 European residents of the colonial capital started to see evidence of rebelliousness everywhere they looked. 91 00:09:58,030 --> 00:10:02,740 They were gripped by a paranoia over a murky threat that was coded as Islamist. 92 00:10:03,310 --> 00:10:10,060 One colonial works in a breathless register the city's atmosphere of 101 rumours rumours of 93 00:10:10,060 --> 00:10:15,250 secret night meetings of fanatical devotees rousing the ignorant multitude to rise up and 94 00:10:15,250 --> 00:10:19,840 murder the enemies of the faith of suspicious looking characters prowling about the houses 95 00:10:19,840 --> 00:10:25,030 of Europeans in the dark of intercepted letters set to specify the plan to be adopted, 96 00:10:25,240 --> 00:10:30,040 and the very hour when all Europeans would be swept away in a deluge of blood. 97 00:10:31,610 --> 00:10:35,180 So it's a tense climate. And in this tense climate, 98 00:10:35,450 --> 00:10:40,130 the Photographic Society of Bengal becomes less concerned with sharing photographic knowledge 99 00:10:40,460 --> 00:10:44,870 and increasingly preoccupied with the political beliefs of one of its founding members, 100 00:10:45,110 --> 00:10:48,500 the archaeologist and linguist Rajendralal Mitra. 101 00:10:49,850 --> 00:10:56,540 On the 6th of April, 1857. Unknown to him, this was pretty much the eve of the uprising. 102 00:10:57,050 --> 00:11:01,670 Mitra had given a speech at the town hall in Calcutta, in which, alongside others, 103 00:11:01,790 --> 00:11:06,440 he condemned the oppressive practices of colonial indigo planters in the region. 104 00:11:07,320 --> 00:11:14,490 These comments may well have passed with little comment from the photographic society, but for the widespread outbreak of violence soon after. 105 00:11:15,440 --> 00:11:22,400 Although the speech had nothing to do with photography, Mitchell's comments nevertheless dominated subsequent society meetings. 106 00:11:23,420 --> 00:11:29,420 Given the state of British paranoia over whether they could continue to see their Indian colleagues as friend or foe. 107 00:11:29,840 --> 00:11:34,280 The criticism that had been levelled against them became intolerable. 108 00:11:35,090 --> 00:11:43,010 A fierce debate broke out over whether Mitra had simply forfeit his right to be a member of the society that he had helped to establish. 109 00:11:43,610 --> 00:11:52,010 So what we find here is that for Indians, at least, the privilege of membership was apparently tied to an uncritical support of British rule. 110 00:11:53,590 --> 00:11:57,700 Mitra was urged to resign, but he refused to do so. 111 00:11:58,090 --> 00:12:02,800 And this the British majority, who by then were widely agitating for his removal. 112 00:12:03,160 --> 00:12:07,420 A bit of a problem because the rules would not allow for the expulsion of a member. 113 00:12:08,350 --> 00:12:13,390 There was talk of simply dissolving the society and starting a new one without Metro. 114 00:12:13,720 --> 00:12:18,670 But in the end, it was decided that whether specially provided for in the rules or otherwise. 115 00:12:18,880 --> 00:12:25,750 Every society possesses an inherent right to expel any member who might render himself obnoxious. 116 00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:33,310 At stake here in this Ferrari was not simply the notion of Indian membership, 117 00:12:33,730 --> 00:12:41,080 but the desirability of the project of Anglicised Asia that had increasingly come to inform the Imperial Project. 118 00:12:41,860 --> 00:12:46,180 This was made clear in a letter to the Calcutta based newspaper, The Englishman, 119 00:12:46,570 --> 00:12:52,810 where one colonial identified himself only on racial grounds as an Anglo-Saxon member, 120 00:12:53,320 --> 00:12:58,300 voiced a desire to ethnically cleansed certain colonial institutions. 121 00:12:58,750 --> 00:13:05,600 I quote, The native must be greatly elevated in the scale of humanity before he can call upon us to to 122 00:13:05,620 --> 00:13:10,510 incur the expense and trouble of teaching him either photography or any of the fine arts. 123 00:13:11,110 --> 00:13:18,010 The majority of members are Europeans who prefer the society of their fellow countrymen to that of 'Fat Baboos’, and who, 124 00:13:18,130 --> 00:13:22,510 having neither promotion nor reward to expect from the government for their labours on behalf 125 00:13:22,510 --> 00:13:28,089 of the Bengalis dislike the idea of any portion of their funds being appropriated to such a 126 00:13:28,090 --> 00:13:33,459 work and therefore had better consider before the next monthly meeting whether it would not 127 00:13:33,460 --> 00:13:40,000 be advisable to establish a photographic society consisting exclusively of European members. 128 00:13:41,270 --> 00:13:47,629 So these sentiments are trying to extricate photography and the arts more broadly from the imperial project, 129 00:13:47,630 --> 00:13:53,480 in which Anglo-Indian elites were to be bound together by shared visions and shared cultural touchstones. 130 00:13:53,840 --> 00:13:57,110 And instead, it's setting up this strict racial divide. 131 00:13:58,050 --> 00:14:04,560 And this is actually quite controversial even among some of the British in an impassioned plea for moderation. 132 00:14:04,860 --> 00:14:11,219 One Colonial pointed out that the Asiatic society had existed for 73 years without finding any 133 00:14:11,220 --> 00:14:16,470 necessity to take the step which the photographic society was asked to take after just one. 134 00:14:17,910 --> 00:14:22,560 In spite of these protests, the unprecedented motion for expulsion was carried. 135 00:14:23,620 --> 00:14:28,030 All the remaining Indian members of the society resigned in protest. 136 00:14:28,330 --> 00:14:30,220 News that was met with cheers. 137 00:14:31,760 --> 00:14:39,920 A small number of renegade colonials who did not support the divisive manoeuvres of their compatriots joined this mass resignation. 138 00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:47,780 Interestingly, this group of exiles went on to form what was labelled an opposition society with 139 00:14:47,780 --> 00:14:52,160 Mitra as secretary and a couple of the dissident colonials in key positions. 140 00:14:53,060 --> 00:14:55,460 It's not clear how long this society lasted. 141 00:14:55,550 --> 00:15:02,300 It's difficult to find much trace of it beyond the occasional disdainful comment in an unsympathetic colonial press. 142 00:15:02,960 --> 00:15:06,740 But it provides a striking demonstration of how photographic photographic 143 00:15:06,740 --> 00:15:12,290 institutions could embody differing colonial ideals around Anglo-Indian relations. 144 00:15:16,210 --> 00:15:23,500 I'd say to my final example of Indian engagement with early photography as the war drew on the now exclusively 145 00:15:23,500 --> 00:15:29,170 European Photographic Society of Bengal turned its sights to another problematic Indian photographer, 146 00:15:29,170 --> 00:15:36,520 an ex-member, one whose facility with the camera had begun to appear sinister to the British in the light of the insurgency. 147 00:15:37,490 --> 00:15:46,550 Before the war, the Bengal Directorate had listed one Ahmed Ali Khan as a respectable native inhabitant of the city of Lucknow. 148 00:15:47,120 --> 00:15:52,340 So he was a slim figure that straddled the fraught social divisions of the colonial environment. 149 00:15:52,610 --> 00:15:58,790 He was well-educated, he was friendly, and he was said to be a great favourite among many European residents, 150 00:15:59,210 --> 00:16:02,930 and he even offered to produce daguerreotype portraits of them. 151 00:16:03,140 --> 00:16:06,800 Free of charge, you can see one of these here on the left. 152 00:16:07,430 --> 00:16:15,560 Portraits such as this would circulate in the Photographic Society of Bengal, and they survive now in the Lucknow album, held in the British Library. 153 00:16:17,080 --> 00:16:25,540 But when Lucknow revolted against colonial rule in 1857, Khan stood with his compatriots against the British becoming so. 154 00:16:25,540 --> 00:16:31,480 One colonial newspaper claimed one of the principal leaders of the Mohammedans section of the rebels. 155 00:16:32,490 --> 00:16:35,790 It's likely that Khan had not approved of the doctrine of lapse. 156 00:16:35,790 --> 00:16:44,340 In 1856, a British decree stating that an Indian ruler forfeited their kingdom if they were manifestly incompetent or died without an heir. 157 00:16:44,880 --> 00:16:51,540 And they did this in order to annexe the state of Ood and imprison its allegedly degenerate nawab Wajid Ali Shah. 158 00:16:52,520 --> 00:16:57,110 Khan had previously been employed as a court photographer for Brigitte on his show, 159 00:16:57,380 --> 00:17:03,890 producing a series of portraits notable for their combination of Mughal aesthetic traditions and European conventions. 160 00:17:04,760 --> 00:17:14,450 And now, with Khan on the side of the rebels, the British faced the prospect of an explicitly anti-colonial insurgent mode of photographic practice. 161 00:17:15,770 --> 00:17:24,020 At the start of the war, colonials in Lucknow quickly found themselves besieged inside the residency building that it had become a makeshift fortress. 162 00:17:24,830 --> 00:17:29,960 By the time the siege was finally relieved, many months later, the residency was a ruin. 163 00:17:30,800 --> 00:17:38,450 Reports emerged that Ahmad Ali Khan had been taking photographs of its defences and passing them to insurgent gunners, 164 00:17:39,110 --> 00:17:46,909 an action it was said that, quote, fully accounts for the remarkable precision of the enemy's fire and the partiality 165 00:17:46,910 --> 00:17:51,320 with which they singled out apartments into which to pour shot during the assault. 166 00:17:52,480 --> 00:18:00,940 So this really was a new form of power, a sophisticated and reportedly devastating use of photographs as military reconnaissance. 167 00:18:02,670 --> 00:18:06,570 Now, whether Khan was actually doing this is another matter. 168 00:18:06,630 --> 00:18:15,960 It was believed to be true by the Colonials, for whom the issue of photography in India had fast become thoroughly militarised during the war. 169 00:18:16,020 --> 00:18:24,000 The Photographic Society of Bengal meetings in Calcutta became a venue in which photographs of nearby conflict zones were circulated. 170 00:18:24,450 --> 00:18:29,580 There were speeches there extolling the benefits that British generals might discover in photography, 171 00:18:30,120 --> 00:18:35,490 and there were even fantasies about using the camera to extract satisfying form of revenge. 172 00:18:36,450 --> 00:18:39,180 When one of Khan's images was shown in his absence. 173 00:18:39,480 --> 00:18:46,020 The president informed the meeting he hoped soon to exhibit a photograph of Khan in another capacity, 174 00:18:46,500 --> 00:18:51,300 meaning, it seems, a trophy photograph of him captured or killed. 175 00:18:53,910 --> 00:19:01,620 The British eventually suppressed the uprising and, following considerable brutality, established an uneasy peace. 176 00:19:02,610 --> 00:19:08,430 The mood around photography swung back to around what it had been before. 177 00:19:08,520 --> 00:19:16,260 The Photographic Society of Bengal readmitted Indian members in 1860 to an arrest era of hegemony and collaboration re-established itself. 178 00:19:17,100 --> 00:19:21,870 But these examples show that the shared Anglo-Indian visions, prompted through the exhibition, 179 00:19:21,870 --> 00:19:30,360 are complex and celebrated by the 1851 Great Exhibition very quickly crumbled when violent realities of empire began to bite. 180 00:19:31,170 --> 00:19:31,590 Thank you.