Well, thank you, Cora, for that introduction. And thank you, Geoff, for inviting me today and for forgiving,
for directing me towards some material to work on which some of you may recognise from the exhibition.
So this talk is going to briefly sketch three episodes of Indian engagement with early photography,
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.
Photography is the conference title states was a new power,
but what was the nature of this power when it came to the governance of Britain's most prized imperial possession?
India power, of course, operates in diverse ways, sometimes subtle and collaborative,
and other times coercive, exclusionary and violent photography flickered across all such force fields.
How it was viewed and its perceived benefits or threats very much depended on
the political context in which the technology was used and viewed so broadly.
I want to see how Anglo-Indian photographic encounters played out in frameworks of war and peace.
Although these were not so neatly separable as it might appear in the case of British colonialism to begin then,
with one of the earliest Indian encounters with with photography,
in the same year that the daguerreotype process was announced to the world,
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.
Their purpose was to torch numerous shipyards and arsenals and to receive some training in chess.
Then it overrule the published account of their trip.
Now on show talks, not so much on their work as engineers,
but on their engagement with an early Victorian culture of visual spectacle Madame Tussauds,
the theatre, Vauxhall Gardens, dioramas and so on and so forth.
When the Indian pair attended a special talk on how to make daguerreotypes at the Royal Institution in London,
the lecture occurred in conjunction with a small exhibit of colonial commodities and technologies,
a glass case display celebrating the versatility of Indian rubber, showing both the raw gum and some of its resulting products.
And these ranged from everything from from tools of war to luxury commodities.
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.
The camera thus entered a British culture of display that rendered the products of empire into a spectacle of power and prosperity.
More specifically, the Indian pair encountered photography in terms of a broader mid-century exhibition area complex.
To use Tony Bennett's term, that encompassed everything from art to scientific instruments and industrial machines.
The exhibition re complex privileged site as an educational and indeed disciplinary
tool and had developed in earnest in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century.
The great exhibition of 1851 was its triumphal expression.
It was predicated on the transfer of objects from private collections into public arenas where they could be seen as expressions of national wealth.
The public display of this kind of material helped to foster citizenship.
Although this, anyway, is Bennett's argument enabling the British to identify it with the power of the modern state.
Numerous art historians have also noted the utility of the exhibition complex for the British in
presenting the Empire in a positive light as an enterprise rooted in technological progress,
rationality and the cultivation of taste. Daniel Rycroft, for one,
has shown how the collaborative nature of imperial power in India was indicated to the British public
in the 1840s and fifties by a newspaper illustration such as the one you see here on the left,
which would show Indian elites participating in the sophisticated spectatorship fostered by shows like The Great Exhibition.
A number of British depictions of the Great Exhibition showed South Asian visitors incorporated into these edifying viewing practices,
strolling around the display courts alongside British spectators.
Exhibitions in this vein proliferated throughout the British Empire, including India, as, for example,
at the Madras Exhibition of 1855, which included everything from photography to military engineering.
So this is a historical moment in which certain members of Indian elites were being courted as
part of a common imperial project through the shared visual experience of technological modernity.
Upon first seeing the Daguerreotypes at the Gallery of Practical Science Narrative mere one,
she duly proclaimed it the most extraordinary production of modern times.
What is interesting about their account is how, in many ways photography is not really privileged.
It's merely one among many modern objects of interest which they see on display in Britain.
For example, in that same gallery on that same evening, they see another item that potentially revealed a much darker side to imperial modernity,
a steam gun that claimed to show forth bullets more than 160 every minute.
And thank you, Jeff, for showing me this image.
Now, actually, even as the pair describe the the the deadly potential of this kind of gun, they mobilise the rhetoric of peace.
Such an invention, they say, would go far towards putting an end to war.
But whether this kind of pacification was to be to the benefit of the British was left somewhat ambiguous.
The strong man will then no longer be able to tyrannised over the weak, they claim.
And then they go on to the day to day delivery.
Delineate delineates the particular implications for the naval force upon which the British Empire was built.
I quote ships which present attack forts almost with a certainty of success would by well-appointed steam gun
have their decks swept of their men and they themselves would be perforated through and through and be sunk.
So is this then an Indian fantasy at the end of Britain's naval supremacy?
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.
The family had worked for the East India Company for generations. The tone of their account is not anti-colonial.
In many ways, it is a play on to the exhibition complex, of which photography was now a part.
Whether it was weaponry, photography or commodities that they encountered,
they would stress the admiration for the institutions that facilitated those sorts of displays.
The publication of such a narrative attested to a British power operating via cultural hegemony,
whereby Indian elites were interpolated as imperial subjects,
sharing certain values and norms with colonial elites, enabling a form of rule predicated supposedly on consent.
So I want to turn now to India itself and consider photography's troubled relationship to this collaborative ideal of imperial power.
Colonial photography has often been written about in terms of a crude imposition of subject object relations with the camera,
shoring up an epistemological divide between Britain and India, the former documenting and classifying the latter.
Yet this story of colonial epistemological privilege obscures the extent to which Indians were.
The agents of early photography are not merely its objects.
When the Photographic Society of Bengal was founded in Calcutta in 1856,
it consisted of both British and Indian members, a fact which they noted proudly.
Indian members gave oversea papers and presented images for consideration.
There were 348 Indian visitors during the opening week of the society's first photographic exhibition in March,
at which at least one Indian photographer was represented. In many ways,
the society was a model of the kind of colonial relations that the British had been
trying to promote through the Agency of World's fairs like the Great Exhibition.
But within a year, not a single Indian member remained.
So what has happened?
In May 1857, a rebellion of Indian soldiers against their British commanders had spread into a widespread uprising against British rule.
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
narratives about the empire as a co-operative endeavour quickly coming under significant strain.
Calcutta itself, where the photographic society was based, remained relatively securely under British control.
But as insurrectionary violence spread through the northern regions of India and threatened to mark the end of British rule in the region,
European residents of the colonial capital started to see evidence of rebelliousness everywhere they looked.
They were gripped by a paranoia over a murky threat that was coded as Islamist.
One colonial works in a breathless register the city's atmosphere of 101 rumours rumours of
secret night meetings of fanatical devotees rousing the ignorant multitude to rise up and
murder the enemies of the faith of suspicious looking characters prowling about the houses
of Europeans in the dark of intercepted letters set to specify the plan to be adopted,
and the very hour when all Europeans would be swept away in a deluge of blood.
So it's a tense climate. And in this tense climate,
the Photographic Society of Bengal becomes less concerned with sharing photographic knowledge
and increasingly preoccupied with the political beliefs of one of its founding members,
the archaeologist and linguist Rajendralal Mitra.
On the 6th of April, 1857. Unknown to him, this was pretty much the eve of the uprising.
Mitra had given a speech at the town hall in Calcutta, in which, alongside others,
he condemned the oppressive practices of colonial indigo planters in the region.
These comments may well have passed with little comment from the photographic society, but for the widespread outbreak of violence soon after.
Although the speech had nothing to do with photography, Mitchell's comments nevertheless dominated subsequent society meetings.
Given the state of British paranoia over whether they could continue to see their Indian colleagues as friend or foe.
The criticism that had been levelled against them became intolerable.
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.
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.
Mitra was urged to resign, but he refused to do so.
And this the British majority, who by then were widely agitating for his removal.
A bit of a problem because the rules would not allow for the expulsion of a member.
There was talk of simply dissolving the society and starting a new one without Metro.
But in the end, it was decided that whether specially provided for in the rules or otherwise.
Every society possesses an inherent right to expel any member who might render himself obnoxious.
At stake here in this Ferrari was not simply the notion of Indian membership,
but the desirability of the project of Anglicised Asia that had increasingly come to inform the Imperial Project.
This was made clear in a letter to the Calcutta based newspaper, The Englishman,
where one colonial identified himself only on racial grounds as an Anglo-Saxon member,
voiced a desire to ethnically cleansed certain colonial institutions.
I quote, The native must be greatly elevated in the scale of humanity before he can call upon us to to
incur the expense and trouble of teaching him either photography or any of the fine arts.
The majority of members are Europeans who prefer the society of their fellow countrymen to that of 'Fat Baboos’, and who,
having neither promotion nor reward to expect from the government for their labours on behalf
of the Bengalis dislike the idea of any portion of their funds being appropriated to such a
work and therefore had better consider before the next monthly meeting whether it would not
be advisable to establish a photographic society consisting exclusively of European members.
So these sentiments are trying to extricate photography and the arts more broadly from the imperial project,
in which Anglo-Indian elites were to be bound together by shared visions and shared cultural touchstones.
And instead, it's setting up this strict racial divide.
And this is actually quite controversial even among some of the British in an impassioned plea for moderation.
One Colonial pointed out that the Asiatic society had existed for 73 years without finding any
necessity to take the step which the photographic society was asked to take after just one.
In spite of these protests, the unprecedented motion for expulsion was carried.
All the remaining Indian members of the society resigned in protest.
News that was met with cheers.
A small number of renegade colonials who did not support the divisive manoeuvres of their compatriots joined this mass resignation.
Interestingly, this group of exiles went on to form what was labelled an opposition society with
Mitra as secretary and a couple of the dissident colonials in key positions.
It's not clear how long this society lasted.
It's difficult to find much trace of it beyond the occasional disdainful comment in an unsympathetic colonial press.
But it provides a striking demonstration of how photographic photographic
institutions could embody differing colonial ideals around Anglo-Indian relations.
I'd say to my final example of Indian engagement with early photography as the war drew on the now exclusively
European Photographic Society of Bengal turned its sights to another problematic Indian photographer,
an ex-member, one whose facility with the camera had begun to appear sinister to the British in the light of the insurgency.
Before the war, the Bengal Directorate had listed one Ahmed Ali Khan as a respectable native inhabitant of the city of Lucknow.
So he was a slim figure that straddled the fraught social divisions of the colonial environment.
He was well-educated, he was friendly, and he was said to be a great favourite among many European residents,
and he even offered to produce daguerreotype portraits of them.
Free of charge, you can see one of these here on the left.
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.
But when Lucknow revolted against colonial rule in 1857, Khan stood with his compatriots against the British becoming so.
One colonial newspaper claimed one of the principal leaders of the Mohammedans section of the rebels.
It's likely that Khan had not approved of the doctrine of lapse.
In 1856, a British decree stating that an Indian ruler forfeited their kingdom if they were manifestly incompetent or died without an heir.
And they did this in order to annexe the state of Ood and imprison its allegedly degenerate nawab Wajid Ali Shah.
Khan had previously been employed as a court photographer for Brigitte on his show,
producing a series of portraits notable for their combination of Mughal aesthetic traditions and European conventions.
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.
At the start of the war, colonials in Lucknow quickly found themselves besieged inside the residency building that it had become a makeshift fortress.
By the time the siege was finally relieved, many months later, the residency was a ruin.
Reports emerged that Ahmad Ali Khan had been taking photographs of its defences and passing them to insurgent gunners,
an action it was said that, quote, fully accounts for the remarkable precision of the enemy's fire and the partiality
with which they singled out apartments into which to pour shot during the assault.
So this really was a new form of power, a sophisticated and reportedly devastating use of photographs as military reconnaissance.
Now, whether Khan was actually doing this is another matter.
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.
The Photographic Society of Bengal meetings in Calcutta became a venue in which photographs of nearby conflict zones were circulated.
There were speeches there extolling the benefits that British generals might discover in photography,
and there were even fantasies about using the camera to extract satisfying form of revenge.
When one of Khan's images was shown in his absence.
The president informed the meeting he hoped soon to exhibit a photograph of Khan in another capacity,
meaning, it seems, a trophy photograph of him captured or killed.
The British eventually suppressed the uprising and, following considerable brutality, established an uneasy peace.
The mood around photography swung back to around what it had been before.
The Photographic Society of Bengal readmitted Indian members in 1860 to an arrest era of hegemony and collaboration re-established itself.
But these examples show that the shared Anglo-Indian visions, prompted through the exhibition,
are complex and celebrated by the 1851 Great Exhibition very quickly crumbled when violent realities of empire began to bite.
Thank you.