Allegory & Illusion by Mapin Publishing

Allegory & Illusion

E. Alkazi WITH A NOTE BY

Jan Van Alphen CONTRIBUTORS

Christopher Pinney Beth Citron Rahaab Allana

THE ALKAZI COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN ASSOCIATION WITH

MAPIN PUBLISHING

Allegory & Illusion

EARLY PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY FROM SOUTH ASIA EAR FOREWORD BY

First published in India in 2013 by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd and The Alkazi Collection of Photography in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Rubin Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (New Delhi). The publishers thank Rubin Museum of Art, New York for their support. Simultaneously published in the United States of America in 2013 by Grantha Corporation E: mapin@mapinpub.com and The Alkazi Collection of Photography India: New Delhi • rahaab@acparchives.com Distributed in North America by Antique Collectors’ Club T: 1 800 252 5231 • F: 413 529 0862 E: sales@antiquecc.com www.accdistribution.com/us Distributed in United Kingdom and Europe by Gazelle Book Services Ltd. T: 44 1524-68765 • F: 44 1524-63232 E: sales@gazellebooks.co.uk www.gazellebookservices.co.uk Distributed in Southeast Asia by Paragon Asia Co. Ltd T: 66 2877 7755 • F: 66 2468 9636 E: info@paragonasia.com Distributed in the rest of the world by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: 91 79 4022 8228 • F: 91 79 4022 8201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com www.mapinpub.com Text © The Alkazi Collection of Photography except Christopher Pinney, Beth Citron and Jan Van Alphen essays © authors. Illustrations © The Alkazi Collection of Photography except those listed below: Figs 3.13, 3.17, 3.18, 5.3, 5.20, 5.21, 5.22, 5.23, 6.23 All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of E. Alkazi, Christopher Pinney, Beth Citron, Jan Van Alphen, Rahaab Allana, Shilpi Goswami, Deepak Bharathan and Jennifer Chowdhry identied as authors of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-81-89995-82-9 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-38-3 (Grantha) LCCN: 2013949047 Copyediting: Neha Manke/Mapin Editorial Design: Jalp Lakhia/Mapin Design Studio Production: Gopal Limbad/Mapin Design Studio Printed by Parksons Graphics, Mumbai

UNACCUSTOMED TRUTH: THE PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY Beth Citron and Rahaab Allana

Front Cover See Fig. 6.19a Page 1 P. Gomes & Co., Bombay Verso of Cabinet Card Ink on Board, 1860 – 1890, caption ofc. front jacket ACP: 98.60.0379.17 back jacket to add here Page 2 Johnston & Hoﬀman A Bengali Couple Hand [Oil] Painted Opalotype, c.1880-1920, 505 x 380 mm ACP: D2008.01.0070 Page 3 Skeen & Co., Ceylon ‘Tamil Women’ Albumen Print, c. 1860-1890, Photographer’s Ref. 1136, 272 x 210 mm ACP: 94.14.0067 Page 4–5 Plâté & Co., Ceylon Group of Kandyan Chiefs Albumen Print, c. 1890, 205 x 257 mm ACP: 96.05.0046 Back Cover Skeen & Co., Ceylon ‘Tamil Girl’ Albumen Print, Photographer’s Ref. 1265, c. 1860 -1890, 273 x 212 mm ACP: 94.18.0071

CURATORIAL NOTE

FOREWORD

SHARING OUR HERITAGE E. Alkazi

RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART Jan Van Alphen

STIRRED BY PHOTOGRAPHY Christopher Pinney

RETHINKING THE FIGURE IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY FROM SOUTH ASIA Beth Citron

STATUESQUE ENTHRALLMENT: THE BODY IN EARLY SOUTH ASIAN PHOTOGRAPHY Rahaab Allana

PHOTOGRAPHERS, STUDIOS, PROCESSES AND FORMATS Shilpi Goswami, Deepak Bharathan and Jennifer Chowdhry

ALKAZI FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS

100

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘We didn’t trust ourselves at rst…to look long at human beings and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyone aﬀected by the unaccustomed clarity and the unaccustomed truth…’ – Walter Benjamin in A Short History of Photography, 1931

CURATORIAL NOTE

UNACCUSTOMED TRUTH: THE PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY Beth Citron and Rahaab Allana

he German artist Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932), while peering at a daguerreotype portrait, was astonished upon seeing his own species imprinted on metal in an unconventional manner. The power of a portrait lies in an uneasy acceptance that while you reect upon the subject—the eyes, those tiny impressions of light upon paper, look back at you. In this respect, photography as an arts practice has repeatedly genuected to the portrait—a means of staging the self. Drawn exclusively from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, this exhibition pays homage to some of the earliest, most iconic samples of photographic portraiture from South Asian countries which are well represented in this private archive—comprising the modern nations of India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Nepal. The former three countries came under the British Empire, while the last was a sovereign kingdom, and together, they established a unique regional history of photography. As part of historic record, these images represent more than just a community of subjects adhering to a portraitist’s dexterous manifestation of their outward appearance. The essence of the collection emanates from history painting, guration, vernacular culture, globalisation, and mass media-related issues, creating a dynamic understanding of the past by disturbing preconceived notions about the colonial era—or the unidirectional gaze. Ethnography, identity, integration, and assimilation are therefore some of the key notions that underlie practices of capturing people and domesticating space— reordering how an image may be perceived in our digital present.

Fig. 1.1 Unknown Photographer; Littleeld Parsons & Co., (Case Maker) Portrait of Henry Marsham Havelock-Allen, V.C. (18301897) Tinted Daguerreotype, c. 1850, 108 x 82 mm [Quarter-plate Union Case] ACP: 97.16.0001

One may pose the question, what can the portrait from South Asia seek to do or to change today? Ed Drew, the American military man who recently captured portraits of his peers in Afghanistan by the wet plate process, says that the experience for him was ‘meditative’, and hence, we too suggest that these images resonate with our own quest for easing communication across borders, in a world where the notion of home and exile are constantly at play. The photographers at work went across continents and formed a visual thesaurus that challenges known stereotypes of what constitutes historical fact and time. The conditions under which some of these images were made diversies the relationship between political events and photographic practice, yet our understanding resists a teleological narrative taking into account not only the role of the medium and the state of technology but, signicantly, photography’s non-linear systems of exchange, circulation and collection. Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal and India are at present some of the nations that constantly grapple with communal and cultural identities. Their exchanges over the last two centuries have yielded a composite understating of a religious and social nature, tied together by a syncretic practice of Buddhism, one that resonates deeply within the scope of the Rubin Museum of Art itself. The people who emerge from these images are not foreigners in the land, or those who have made it their colony—but the inhabitants. These are not images of people who have been merely consumed by conict and colonialism, but who have paved a path of resistance by displaying their entitlement to their homes with dignity and austerity.

Fig. 2.1 Cambridge and Company ‘Parsees’ Albumen Print, c. 1890, 184 x 234 mm ACP: 94.66.0013

FOREWORD

SHARING OUR HERITAGE E. Alkazi Chairman, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

n an enthralling albumen portrait of members from the Parsi community shot in the 1890s, the photographer, presumably employed by Cambridge and Company, demonstrates a formal yet empathetic rendition of a joint family—the striking matriarch in the centre with her grandchildren at her feet. The Parsis of Gujarat and Bombay, many of whom I knew and worked with—are a community recognised for their rened sense of taste, their dignied attire, their depth of knowledge and their patronage of industry and art. It was said that they literally absorbed India when they rst arrived from Persia (Iran). Using a common metaphor—if the people of India were a bowl of milk, the Parsis represented a stful of sugar that dissolved in it, enriching it. Their dedication thence to institutional development and merging in Maharashtrian society more specically, informed my own sense of a cultural heritage and assimilation when I rst came to Bombay from Pune in the 1940s. Over the last several years, while travelling from city to city, I have been brought to think about my own sense of home and family—one that has changed with every passing year. As Arabs in India, our family managed a lucrative business, but at every stage we adopted India as our home as much as it accepted us as a people. With the passage of time, we were witness to the Second World War, the Partition of India, to the Gulf wars as some of us eventually settled in Kuwait. I was, however, always drawn back my own origins—and during my years away from India collected what I could of its history from other nations. This drive was as real as it was metaphysical—the need to retrieve, preserve and enhance the core of my identity wherever I went. The idea of an evolving identity and the need to return to my ‘origins’ has hence underlain my sense of what I have collected—as well as why and for whom I have collected. In this exhibition, the likes of Felice Beato, Johnston and Hoﬀman, Herogg and Higgins, Matzene, and Skeen together with Shapur Bhedwar, Hurrychand Chintamon, Abbas Ali—challenge the conventions of society through the aesthetic and controversial exposure of the people from across the South Asian region. Their means of sharing their resources, their knowledge and skill has today changed our understanding of an Asian identity for time to come. They were collected so as to grapple with the world of cultures—the ethics of sharing and giving back to people, what was so generously given to me by people. In this respect, photography allows for a dynamic vision— it projects actions, creates both mergers and contrasts, it tells a tale of make-believe and incontestable truth. But photography is more personal than what it captures—as time passes, families part and objects like the photograph change course and arrive in diﬀerent places. Imagine then the portrait here of the Parsis—did they ever pose as a family again, and what were the destinies and legacies of those in the image? The search for an answer is not only the beginning of our understanding of a collective history— but that the identity of the self can be elsewhere and everywhere on earth.

Fig. 2.2 Unknown Photographer; Unknown Artist Maharani Krishna Kumari of Nepal [wife of Maharaja Dev Shamshere Rana] Gelatin Silver Print and Oil Paint, c. 1900, 293 x 237 mm ACP: D2003.13.0046

RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART Jan Van Alphen Director of Exhibitions, Collections & Research, Rubin Museum of Art

llegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia comprises an exhibition and book that have come together in the true sense of partnership and collaboration.

The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and Mapin Publishing, two valued partners for the Rubin Museum of Art, have collaborated to produce a book to complement the exhibition presented at the Museum in the fall of 2013. The exhibition, too, is a collaboration between Beth Citron, curator at the Rubin, and Rahaab Allana of the Alkazi Foundation, who worked together to choose images and to write an interpretive documentation. Relying on the rich resources and generosity of the Alkazi Foundation, the two curators have been able to enhance the presentation with albums, video documentation, and backdrops to encourage active visitor participation in the exploration of photographic portraiture. The related publication, with contributions by Allana, Citron, and Christopher Pinney—a noted visual anthropologist, oﬀers visitors another, perhaps deeper, way to consider the history and the literal and metaphorical meaning of early portrait photography in South Asia. Especially in India, the story of the emergence of these photographs out of the tradition of court painting and colonial attitudes is complex and compelling. The photographs are not always or only what they seem. We at the Rubin Museum of Art are grateful to be a part of this collaboration, oﬀering such

a layered yet accessible presentation of this fascinating material.

Fig. 2.3 Teak wood standing camera with extendable tripod The lens used is G. Rodenstock (made in Germany), with a 6.4 x 8.5 inch plate size. Rodenstock was a rm making optical instruments, which became famous for creating the rst bifocal lenses in the 1930s.

STIRRED BY PHOTOGRAPHY Christopher Pinney

Stir. v. To move, set in motion […] To move (something) from its place; to shift, displace […] To agitate […] so as to alter the relative position of the parts of […] To move from a xed or quiet position […] To bring into notice or debate; to move, raise, moot (a subject or question)” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)

his exhibition looks not just at India (as is usually the case), but Ceylon, Nepal, and Burma also make their appearance in the early history of photography in the region. The

category here is the South Asian subcontinent. Area-specialist pedants may object that Burma is conventionally South-East Asia according to current area studies conventions. But at the time that the images shown here were made, it was ruled from British India. The sweep of images presented here directs our attention to questions of nomenclature, denitions, demarcations, units of identity and also to the ways these might have endured or changed over the course of time (Fig. 3.1). Why Photography? That is potentially privilege a medium that we might want to recategorise as a form of late painting, as there are so many variables, so many potential alliances and conjunctions. We need to decide which are the most useful formulations, and the most productive and illuminating congurations. Is it Photography in South Asia, from South Asia?

It is presumably the photographer, any photographer in or from South Asia, since there are images here by South Asians, some also by colonisers, and many by commercial entrepreneurs whose main client base may not have been South Asian. But should we focus on photographers, or would the camera serve us better—the camera in South Asia? Should we say photographs of South Asia, or photographs of people in South Asia? At the level of basic genre we can say that this is an exhibition of portraiture rather than landscape or architecture. How we congure the broader set of conjunctions will in part determine what kind of exhibition this is. Are you looking at images that speak to the history of South Asia or the history of photography? Clearly this can never be only one or the other, but every spectator will push that question along a sliding scale, tilting the balance one way or another. This essay tries to think through the issues at stake in this choice. All the photographs here, traces of specic moments, became starting points of a complex enquiry. Reframed in this exhibition, all these images are beginnings, not end points. If the tilt of our evaluative scales points towards South Asia rather than photography, we are then faced with a further set of choices. How do we conceptualise this identity in space and time, i.e. regionally and historically? We might default to an Indic tradition, a world of Sanskrit texts lost in the mists of time that continue to exert a gravitational pull. There is much in that

tradition that promises to cast light on the images here. Consider Ananda Coomaraswamy’s typically erudite and dazzling essay on traditional conceptions of ideal portraiture in India, rst published in 1939. He cites texts that eulogise an ideal, canonical mode of portraiture and contrasts this negatively with the depiction of human likeness which is “not heavenward looking” (Sukranitisara IV.4.76) and identify the diﬀerence between “the deied man and the man as he had been on earth” (Pratimanataka; Coomaraswamy 1943:117) (Fig. 3.2). Fig. 3.1 Evans & Co., Bradbury, London Political Map of Asia Ink on Paper, c. 1880-1920, 278 x 372 mm The Alkazi Collection of Photography

This disinterest in individuated exteriority, the commitment to “impersonality and serenity” (1943:126) and to what is “essential and original” (1943:127) might explain those photographic portraits collected here that appear to privilege formality and frontality, the selfpresentation of the body as “eﬃgy”. We might choose to see in the images collected here evidence of a self-representation by South Asians when confronted with the camera (Fig. 3.3).

In fact, Coomaraswamy’s observations are echoed in a strikingly pronounced way by many of the late 20th-century customers of small-town photographic studios in Central India which I have reported in my own ethnographic study of vernacular portraiture (Pinney, 1997). There studio proprietors joke that village customers, committed to the full-body eﬃgy, insist that they will only pay 75 per cent of the fee for a three-quarters length photo, 50 per cent for a half-length and so on. Note that this claim for locality against medium specicity (photography) can incarnate as politically radical (stressing indigenous agency), or appear reactionary (an Orientalist assertion of the tenacity of tradition and an apparent denial of any expansionary and disruptive local history). Before we are fully seduced by this fortuitous alignment between a deep Indic tradition and the evidence in front of our eyes, we should note that Coomarswamy himself sets out to dismantle the culturally rooted characterisation that he sets out to describe. He does this in two ways, rst by showing that the Indic part of the equation is much more complex and second by arguing that Europe had similar expectations at the same time. The Indic tradition certainly included the positions outlined above, but it also included an opposed set of practices that celebrated the historicised and individuated face. There were, Coomaraswamy insists, “two quite diﬀerent kinds of portraiture, respectively posthumous, hieratic, and ideal on the one hand, and taken from life, profane and sentimental on the other” (1943:117-8). Furthermore, an Orientalist opposition between a hieratic Indic tradition and an individuated Europe does not work either, since as Coomaraswamy argues medieval Christianity shared with the Indic the search (here he follows Émile Mâle) for a “calculus” of the “essential and original” (1943:127). It is true that Coomaraswamy traces in the Renaissance the seeds of a divergence, for it was Fig. 3.2 Unknown Artist Pahari Miniature [Women engaged in a Private Conversation] Natural Pigments on Paper, c. 1900, 199 x 131 mm Collection: Ebrahim Alkazi

then that Europe shifted its interest “from an inner presence to an outer present, from the spiritual essence of the very Man to the accidents of his sensitive outer ego” (1943:126). This might provide the grounds for an argument about contrasting visual modes that echoes the French anthropologist Louis Dumont’s by turns celebrated and reviled opposition of an Indian Homo Hierarchicus with a European Homo Aequalis. Just as Coomaraswamy assumes a commonality in early Indian and European approaches to the image, so Dumont attributes

a foundational quality to hierarchy. Hierarchy, he suggests, was the natural state of man. But then Europe had history that bestowed (owing to the French Revolution) transgressive ideas about equality and individualism. India avoided this fate and so Dumont was able to title his study of the Indian caste system Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont, 1980). He had a slight problem, however, which was that despite his conviction that India’s beauty was the prism that it oﬀered to a universal past (the principle of hierarchy), even he had to admit that India had been stirred and shaken by history. In its contemporary incarnation it was too unruly and awkward to t his model and so Dumont had to introduce a distinction between “traditional India” (an India that had existed until very recently and still endured in quite a few remote places) and India as it actually was (disordered by Cambridge-educated politicians and the “non-endogenous” ideas of John Dewey, which owed through the conduit of the Dalit intellectual and leader Bhimrao Ambedkar). Presenting his magnum opus to the world, Dumont had to confess at the very beginning that anyone wanting to understand “modern India” would probably be disappointed (I should perhaps at once warn the reader that he will nd nothing here Fig. 3.3 Gobindram & Oodeyram [Attribution] ‘A Hindoo Woman’ Albumen Print, c. 1880, 124 x 166 mm ACP: 94.48.0004

immediately relevant to the very urgent problems of contemporary India—Dumont 1980:xlv). A modern Coomaraswamy who sought to present the images in this exhibition as examples of Homo Portrait-idealus would have to confront a similar problem: the Indic ‘tradition’ is only accessible to us now through the complex refractions of a mediated history disordered by printing and lithography and stirred by photography (Fig. 3.4).

Indeed, after reading Coomaraswamy in search of a civilisational solution to our central question we might be persuaded to completely overturn our initial expectation. Coomaraswamy writes of Indian votive statues in which “the intention to represent a human being is evident, but the facial expression is altogether of a type, without individual peculiarities” (1943:117). This description of ancient Indian practice could be as easily transposed to a 19th-century colonial context in which photographers working directly or indirectly or even the British colonial state presented anonymised ‘typical’ specimens of the peoples of India (Fig. 3.5). An observant viewer of the exhibition may have been struck by the various ‘ethnographic’ studies of occupational types (Fig. 3.6, Fig. 3.7 & Fig. 3.8). These fuse a European tradition of the representation of the Cries of London type (genre images of peddlers, hawkers and other tradesmen; Shesgreen, 2002) with the French Enlightenment Encyclopedia’s fascination with the visualisation of work processes (Barthes, 1983), and an increasingly rampant Fig. 3.4 D. Nusserwanji, Mumbai [Attribution]; Unknown Artist Baby Krishna Eating Butter Gelatin Silver Print, c. 1910 – 1930, 109 x 151 mm ACP: 98.83.0138

anthropological fascination with occupation and caste as keys to the complexity of South Asian society (Pinney, 1990). Indeed, within anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th century a bitter struggle would be fought between those who saw caste as ‘biological’ (that is, individual castes were understood to be distinct gene pools, and hence caste was potentially visualisable as ‘race’) and those who saw it as a more uid set of identity categories focussed on occupation. We could debate the precise historical determinants at length,

but the ‘Woman Vending Prawns’ genre is notable for its eﬃgy-like pre-occupation with (to recall Coomaraswamy) “facial expression […] of a type, without individual peculiarities”. Let us dwell for a moment on what just happened here and observe in slow motion how our train, which was supposed to be chugging along on its civilisational course, has just suddenly jumped tracks. Coomaraswamy oﬀers one way of grasping a “traditional” (Indian) conception of “Ideal Portraiture” that privileges the type, the calculus, the “hieratic” before then going Fig. 3.5 Unknown Photographer Group of Tribals from Western India [Photographed in Bombay] Albumen Print, c. 1860- 1890, 190 x 238 mm ACP: 94.66.0021

on to show that this was always in conict (in India) with a “secular art of portraiture in which a real likeness to the living subject was always essential to the social, and largely erotic, purpose of the work” (1943:117) (Fig. 3.9). When we think about this claim for a potential deep Indic lineage we discover that some of the images that best sustain it, perhaps to our amazement, are ‘ethnographic’ studies clearly made under the shadow of colonialism (in other words, at a considerable distance from the Indic tradition) which ask its Indian sitters

Fig. 3.6 Gobindram & Oodeyram [Attribution] ‘Woman Vending Prawns’ Albumen Print, c. 1880 – 1900, 139 x 100 mm ACP: 94.48.0007 Fig. 3.7 Gobindram & Oodeyram [Attribution] ‘Parched Grain Seller’ Albumen Print, c. 1880 – 1900, 109 x 137 mm ACP: 94.48.0031 Fig. 3.8 Gobindram & Oodeyram [Attribution] ‘Shaving’ Albumen Print, c. 1880 – 1900, 132 x 193 mm ACP: 94.48.0032

Fig. 3.9 Darogah Abbas Ali A Lucknow Courtesan Albumen Print on Carte-de-Visite, c. 1865-1870, 92 x 53 mm ACP: 98.64.0002

to perform as prawn vendors, as barbers, and as grain sellers—as occupational eﬃgies in Fig. 3.10a Hurrychand Chintamon, Bombay Maharaja Jayaji Rao Scindia of Gwalior (1835-1886) Albumen Print on Carte-de-Visite, c. 1876 - 1878, 91 x 57 mm ACP: 98.60.0356 Fig. 3.10b Unknown Photographer; Devi Lal (Udaipur) Maharaja Madhav Rao Scindia II of Gwalior (1886 – 1925) Gelatin Silver Print and Oil Paint, c. 1920 – 1925, 588 x 407 mm ACP: D2007.01.0010

other words. There may be ingenious ways in which we could try to reconcile this proximity between archaic ritual expectations and modern technical practices (Hegel’s observation that “reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s [form of] prayer” suggests one way of trying to do this—Hegel, 2002:247, McLuhan’s pre-occupation with the mythic qualities of media might be another—McLuhan, 2003), but they will not allow us (in respect of these images) to make any glib statements about civilisational continuity. A memorable example of image inversion or perhaps more accurately mirroring (by which I mean a mimetic doubling involving transposition) is provided by the art historian Wu Hung in his fascinating consideration of Milton Miller. His provocative suggestion is that Milton Miller, who worked as a photographer in Hong Kong from 1859 onwards (Hung, 2011: 69), had his Chinese sitters perform what he thought to be a quintessential mode of Chinese portraiture in front of the camera, a reinvention of a stereotype for global consumption.

This occurred in a space of mimicry and doubling in which there were no isolated ‘local’ practices. These representational idioms, stirred by photography, in turn fed back into Chinese understandings of what camera consciousness ought to entail. This track-switching might also be approached through the different metaphorical register of mixing and stirring to which the title of this essay alludes. Marshall McLuhan wrote about “inter-media” and W.J.T. Mitchell has argued that all media is mixed media (Mitchell, 2005: 211, 215). For both McLuhan and Mitchell these ‘stirred’ practices were to be celebrated. A more ambivalent response is provided by the painter Val C. Prinsep’s journals of his travels in India in 1877 as part of a commission to paint the Delhi Durbar. His account documents numerous encounters with intermediated practices. Despite being (or maybe because he was) the nephew of the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Prinsep’s narrative provides a powerful account of the polluting nature of intermedia. Consider his sardonic account of a meeting with three artists from Delhi, including one Ismael Khan: “Their manual dexterity is most surprising. Of course what they do is entirely traditional. They work from photographs and never by any chance from nature” (n.d.:p.47). Prinsep continually bemoans the unwillingness of his subjects to “sit” for their portraits. Photography appears to have introduced an attention decit disorder and an expectation that images be produced rapidly. Scindia of Gwalior is especially impatient (the “worst sitter” Prinsep had yet encountered) and it then comes as no surprise that following the ruler’s departure, Prinsep sees in the room “two very comic full-length portraits of the Maharajah, one by a native, done from a photograph, extraordinarily worked up to look like a nightmare” (n.d.:66) (Fig. 3.10a & Fig. 3.10b). Scindia’s son, Bulwant Singh, is like Ram Singh II of Jaipur, Prinsep tells us, a keen photographer. The Jaipur School of Art is the feeblest of all institutions, Prinsep later declares churning out “so many nightmares: large copies of photographs of the Prince of Wales, Lord Northbrook, and other Governors-General, with the ghastly stare such things have when done by beginners” (n.d.:89). Whereas for McLuhan, writing in the mid-20th century, intermedia offered an almost utopian promise, for Prinsep the ‘stirring’ of media by photography is almost pathological. He describes a room in the Rae-ka-Bagh in Jodhpur “tted up with European articles according to the habit of Rajahs. On the table in the centre were two large clocks, endless cases for photographs and knick-knacks of all kinds” (n.d.: 125). In Udaipur he sees “two portraits of one of the later ranas, with very elaborate frames made of glass and plaster, in which were solid glass bosses composed of those well-known paper weights, with owers and views of Brighton, found at all sea-side bazaars” (n.d.:160). Prinsep would doubtless have been horried by many of the images in this exhibition that allow an intimacy of different media. Imagine his response to a beautiful representation of a group of devotees in front of the image of Shrinathji, a form of Krishna, in Nathdwara in Rajasthan. Nathdwara might be thought of as the ground zero of popular (North) Indian

Facing Page Fig. 3.11 Unknown Photographer; Painter Nathalal Jekisendas Nathdwara, Mewar Shri Damodar Lalji Maharaj Goswami [Head Priest of the Nathdwara Temple] Gelatin Silver Print and Watercolour, c. 1910 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1930, 147 x 104 mm ACP: 98.83.0143

Fig. 3.12 Unknown Photographer; Unknown Artist Senior Goswami [Senior Priest at Nathdwara Temple] Gelatin Silver Print and Watercolour, c. 1910 -1930, 147 x 105 mm ACP: 98.83.0144

visual culture. Priests (Fig. 3.11 & Fig. 3.12) from Shrinathji’s haveli are present elsewhere in this exhibition and artists from the town would supply the earliest designs in the late 1920s for the commercial print publisher S. S. Brijbasi who would revolutionise Indian visual culture for the rest of the 20th century (Pinney, 2004). Fig. 3.13 Unknown Photographer A Photographic Manorath. Devotees Pose on either side of a Painted Image of Srinathji in a Photographic Studio in Nathdwara, Rajasthan Gelatin Silver Print pasted on Card Mount, c. 1930 Courtesy: Collection of Christopher Pinney

The image of the devotees before their deity depicts a manorath and many early painted examples survive (Ambalal, 1987; Skelton, 1973; Lyons, 2004). In the earlier paint-only versions of these, wealthy pilgrims paid to have their own faces interpolated into the image. Chromolithography provided mass-produced templates that allowed devotees to imagine themselves occupying the space held by stock gures. Photography allowed two new yet familiar kinds of relationship to Shrinathji. Photographic faces could be pasted onto vividly coloured backdrops (probably mass-produced by female artists) to produce something very close to conventional manoraths but which were individuated photographically. A slightly later and much cheaper alternative (which survives through to the present in Nathdwara

Facing Page Fig. 3.14 Unknown Photographer Seated Parsi Lady with a Pet Dog Glass Plate Negative and Digitally Produced Positive, c. 1900, 120 x 164 mm ACP: T10-2013

photographic studios) deployed the camera to produce studio images in which devotees were photographed on either side of a painted image of Shrinathji (Fig. 3.13). Another image in this exhibition, printed from a glass negative and depicting a woman seated above her three dogs, presents a non-Royal example of the kind of intermediated mise en scène that so troubled Prinsep (Fig. 3.14). This image in turn leads us to S. B. Syed’s

remarkable painted photograph of a woman working on a portrait in oils. The diﬀerence in media frustrates its potential as a mise en abyme and instructs the viewer to contemplate it as an allegory of representation, as a “metapicture” (Mitchell, 1994) (Fig. 3.15). The explicitly painterly and impressionistic texture of the canvas appears to set up a tension with the smooth and immaculately tinted texture of the photograph. And yet this image invites us to think about the photographer’s artistry. The image seems to urge us to think about its creator not as a technician, a mere master of lenses and chemicals, but as himself an artist like (or indeed better) than the one whom he has photographed. Commercial photographers, everywhere not just in India, invested themselves in an iconography of oil painting. This was often visible on the verso of carte-de-visite and cabinet cards. Purvezji Dadabhai’s Eos Studio in Kalbadevi Road, Bombay, for instance featured an engraving of a bellows camera in front of which a painted image (curling at the bottom in a cartouche) (Fig. 3.16) is placed against a palette through which four paint brushes protrude. “Photographic Artists” is the plangent claim on the cabinet card versos of numerous studios Fig. 3.15 S. B. Syed Dabhol; Unknown Artist Lady Painting a Portrait Gelatin Silver Print and Watercolour, c. 1920 – 1940, 223 x 280 mm ACP: D2008.01.0004

throughout India. Gomes and De Lair of Bombay (Fig. 3.17) depicted a female muse clutching at a star ascending skywards beneath those very words. The Calcutta Art Studio, of Bow Bazar St. Calcutta, best known as lithographers but also running a photographic studio for several decades, advertised “Portraits from Life or Photo in Water or Oil Colours”. R. Venkiah Bros of Madras featured an artist’s palette on the recto, embossed with the information “Artists & Photographers”.

Fig. 3.16 EOS Photographic Company, Bombay Verso of Cabinet Card Ink on Board, Photographer’s Ref. 600a, c. 1880 – 1890, 164 x 106 mm ACP: 95.0037(02)

Fig. 3.17 Gomes and De Lair, Bombay Verso of Cabinet Card Ink on Board, c. 1880 Courtesy: Collection of Christopher Pinney

S. B. Syed’s image may have encouraged its viewers to contemplate the story of Usha and Chitralekha, an old narrative given new popularity through a late 19thcentury painting by Raja Ravi Varma and a Telugu play rst performed in 1901. Usha, the daughter of a king, dreamt one night that she had been kissed by a handsome prince. She then asked the artist Chitralekha to produce portraits of local princes through which Usha is able to identify her future husband (he turns out to be Aniruddha the grandson of Krishna). In Ravi Varma’s image we see Chitralekha seated on the oor producing images that Usha contemplates with a lovelorn expression (Fig. 3.18). This narrative mediates dreams, the imagination, and mimesis, and in Ravi Varma’s iteration doubtless speaks to his own prowess as an artist who realised dreams and made the mythic tangible. But the frame within a frame, with which Ravi Varma plays in his representation, mobilises resources that oil painting, lithography and photography certainly stirred but did not create de novo. The “frame story”, as it has become known, has been identied by many linguistic and literary scholars as a common feature of much Indian narrative convention (Witzel 1987). This involves a complex doubling in which narration is often doubled through the enframing of a story within a story. Frame stories can be seen as one element of a broader fascination with selfreferentiality and reexivity in many forms of Indian narrative production (Ramanujan Fig. 3.18 Ravi Varma ‘Usha and Chitralekha’ from S.N. Joshi Half-tone Reprints of the Renowned Pictures of the Late Raja Ravi Varma (Poona: Chitrashala Steam Press, 1911) Later half-tone reproduction of original Oil Painting, c. 1890 Courtesy: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

1989:203). One result of this doubling is that “mimesis is never only mimesis, for it evokes the earlier image in order to play with it and make it mean other things”, making mirrors turn into windows (Ramanujan 1989:207; see also Chatterji 2012:264-66). This prompts the observation that what may appeal to us as viewers today because it resonates as representational allegory with Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas or Baudrillard’s account of the precession of simulacra may need to be re-routed back through a complex history of narrative construction in India. Perhaps photography ‘stirs’ the present but not so profoundly that it eradicates the past. It sets elements of an existing repertoire in new

Facing Page Fig. 3.19 Unknown Photographer & Artist A Lady on the Couch with a Telephone Gelatin Silver Print and Oil Paint, c. 1920-1940, 392 x 605 mm ACP: D2009.07.0014

forms of motion, agitating them and making them capable of asking new kinds of questions. It disorders the relation between the past and the present, not simply mirroring it but turning it, as Ramanujan suggested, into a window onto the future.

REFERENCES Ambalal, Amit. Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathdwara. Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1987. Chatterji, Roma. Speaking With Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2012. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. “The Traditional Conception of Ideal Portraiture”. In Why Exhibit Works of Art? London: Luzac & Co., 1943 (1939).

Photography in China. Los Angeles: Getty Research Centre, 2011. Lyons, Tryna. The Artists of Nathdwara: The Practice of Painting in Rajasthan. Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2004. McLuhan, Marshall. “TV News as a New Mythic Form”. In Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (Eds.) Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2003, pp. 158–172.

–––––. ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Prinsep, Val C. Imperial India: An Artist’s Journals. London: Chapman and Hall, N.d. [c.1878]. Ramanujan, A.K. “Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reection”. In History of Religions, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1989, pp. 187–216.

Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Complete Revised English Edition. Translated by Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont and Basia Gulati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 (1966).

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Shesgreen, Sean. Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

–––––. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Skelton, Robert. Rajasthani Temple Hangings of the Krishna Cult. New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1973.

Hegel, G. W. F. Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, translation by Jon Bartley Stewart. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

Pinney, Christopher. “Colonial Anthropology in the ‘Laboratory of Mankind”. In C.A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990.

Hung, Wu. “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography”. In Jeﬀrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak (eds.), Brush and Shutter: Early

–––––. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Witzel, Michael E. J. “On the origin of the literary device of the ‘Frame Story’ in Old Indian literature”. In H. Falk (ed.), Hinduismus und Buddhismus, Festschrift für U. Schneider. Freiburg, pp. 380–414.

RETHINKING THE FIGURE IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY FROM SOUTH ASIA Beth Citron

he layered history of the gure in South Asian art spans Mohenjo Daro to Mumbai, sacred and secular forms, and every imaginable artistic medium and moment. And yet, within this

well-established narrative, striking questions remain to be answered that would challenge the linearity and chronology of the representation of the gure: on the role of early photography from the subcontinent in its own history of art and also on the relationship of guration to

portraiture, the latter being a core subject of the new medium of photography in South Asia. The exhibition Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia focuses on portrait-based representations of people from the modern nation states of India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma, including a signicant and varied selection of painted photographs from India and Nepal. A group of painted photographs, in particular, poses important questions regarding the integration of photography into an existing South Asian art history and about how the conceptual address of portraiture (as a Western conception introduced in the Mughal period) and guration (already integral to Indian art) may or may not coexist in some of these works. This brief exploratory essay considers both of these issues and hopes to show the critical importance of these topics to the body of work in Allegory and Illusion. Photography arrived in South Asia in 1840, within a year of its invention in Europe. Its early history in India specically has been tied explicitly to colonial histories in recent scholarship,1 leading to but one reason why photography from this period is most often passed over in mainstream academic and popular histories of South Asian art. (For example, the concluding chapters in Vidya Dehejia’s classic primer Indian Artbproceed from “The Luxuries of Mughal Art” and “Rajput Mewar” to two chapters on colonial art in India—“Churches of Portuguese Goa” and “Art of the British Raj”—with little mention of photography at all, and only a single example of a work by an Indian photographer—Lala Deen Dayal (1844–1905)—during the period of British rule.) Yet, as has been described recently by Partha Mitter in an essay on early photography in India,2 there is an important link between Mughal aesthetics and the styles associated with early photography in South Asia. This has led Christopher Pinney’s prompt to re-categorise this material “as a form of late painting” in his essay in this volume, contra earlier claims that this work may merely represent the decline of painting in South Asia.3 The purpose of this essay, then, is to inscribe the early history of photography in South Asia not only with a genealogical trace to earlier and later painterly practices but also to suggest that the medium evolved to create unique conceptions with regard to the idea and image of the gure. Rajput along with Mughal aesthetics can be seen in a selection of works in the exhibition, including Fig. 4.1, which closely resembles Rajasthani paintings of Srinathji worship, in

Fig. 3.4 (p. 16) for its following of Mughal conventions while depicting deities as infant rulers, and in Fig. 4.2 and Fig. 4.3 for their quotation of Mughal perspective and architecture. All four photographs convincingly and intentionally stake claims to stylistic continuities with Indian visualities and histories. If these linkages are not enough reason to push for the inclusion of 19th- and early 20th-century photography into mainstream South Asian art history, let us also look at the ways in which painted photographs of this period anticipate a constellation of essential characteristics of modernism in the visual arts—such as atness, abstraction, quotation, and the embrace of new technology itself—that become dened as part of a modern discourse internationally as well as in India only in the next century, and especially in the medium of painting. Through these tropes we may see how this critical moment of photography is not just a potential extension of “late painting” but also an intermediate, inter-medium link between two periods of South Asian art history (until now, described by scholars mostly as a history of painting). Photography from this era also marks a transition between a period led by sacred and royal arts and one marked by secular and autonomous Fig. 4.1 Unknown Photographer; Chitrakar Jujiram Gopilal Nathdwara, Mewar Family Worshipping Srinathji Albumen Print and Watercolour, c. 1900, 450 x 605 mm ACP: D2009.07.0016

modes of expression for various audiences, as photography for the rst time oﬀered a range of access points for both royalty and the middle classes. Evidence of this period as a stylistic bridge is embodied in qualities of the painted photographs Maharaja Venkat Raman Singh of Rewa (Fig. 4.4), Portrait of a Seated Woman (Fig. 4.5) and Lady Painting a Portrait (Fig. 3.15). In Fig. 4.4, we see the main gure seated next to a

table with a still-life prop (in this case, two vases of owers), extending a familiar trope in portrait photographs of this period. The work’s gesture towards abstraction, and indeed the way in which it challenged Mughal approaches to portraiture, can be seen in the painted background behind the gure, with a attened blue square inset into a primed white wall, presumably organised in this way to accentuate Singh’s facial features. This attening and conscious interjection of a at geometric plane ensures the viewer’s focus on the decorated, naturalistic gure in the foreground. It also, perhaps inadvertently, connects the work to a modernist abandon of foreshortening and perspective. A similar convention is applied to Fig. 4.5, representing a seated woman against a blue planar background that is broken only by a peculiarly modelled red curtain painted at left, nearly creating the effect of a proscenium around this portrait. And in Fig. 3.15, the creations and breaks with illusion, along with its canny riff on the notion of painted photograph, reveal a modernist artistic self-fashioning— the interplay in this work between oil painting and photographic conventions are all the more complex because Syed uses watercolor for his rendition of the palette and painted canvas on which the woman works. While portraiture and guration both seek representations of personhood, they do so through partially different approaches. One conventional distinction is that the primary Fig. 4.2 Court Photographer & Artist Thakur Zorawar Khan of Kanota (1826–1908) Gelatin Silver Print and Watercolour, c. 1890, 250 x 298 mm ACP: 98.83.0187

goal of portraiture is to reveal a likeness of the sitter, while guration (a broader category that can include portraiture) may or may not include verisimilitude in its form as it explores physical and psychological aspects of the human condition. Thus, even as guration has been integral to South Asian art since the time of ancient Indus Valley civilisation, recent scholarship suggests that portraiture was introduced in India only during the Mughal period through European inuence.4 In early photography, a concept of portraiture based on

Facing Page Fig. 4.3 Unknown Photographer; M. K. Tamkin, Bhopal Princess Abida Sultan of Bhopal (1913-2002) [Princess Abida Sultan was the eldest of the three daughters of Nawab Hamidulla Khan of Bhopal] Platinum Print and Watercolour, November 1921, 270 x 235 mm ACP: 2008.01.0011

likeness is assumed because of the necessity of the subject as sitter, and also because of the 19th-century notion of “the camera… as an apparatus of ‘insight,’ by which a person’s limited ocular capacity can discern Nature’s truth.”5 Painted photographs in particular, and even photo-montages like Fig. 4.2, oﬀered an opportunity to reassess conventions of portraiture inherited from Mughal painting by rejecting certain aspects of naturalism (as in the attened blue plane in Fig. 4.4). Certain painted photographs also established creative relationships between portraiture and broader approaches to guration, as in Fig. 4.6. That work is a memorial portrait of the

PHOTOGRAPHY the alkazi collection of photography

Allegory & Illusion

Early Portrait Photography from South Asia Christopher Pinney, Beth Citron and Rahaab Allana 100 pages, 101 colour photographs 9.5 x 10.75” (242 x 275 mm), pb ISBN: 978-81-89995-82-9 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-38-3 (Grantha) ₹1950 | $39.50 | £26 2013 • World rights