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The Coming of Photography in India 01 Pages I-X Prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page Ii 01 Pages I-X Prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page Iii 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page i The Coming of Photography in India 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page ii 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page iii The Coming of Photography in India CHRISTOPHER PINNEY THE BRITISH LIBRARY 2008 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page iv For Robert and Thomas, and their love of India, and the camera First published 2008 by The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB © Christopher Pinney 2008 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this volume is available from The British Library ISBN 978 0 7123 4972 7 Designed by John Trevitt Typeset in Walbaum by Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton Printed in Hong Kong by South Sea International Press 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page v Contents Acknowledgements page vii List of abbreviations ix 1 Photography as Cure 1 2 Photography as Poison 51 3 Photography as Prophecy 103 Index 161 [v] 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page vi 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page vii Acknowledgements This book is a revised version of the Panizzi Lectures delivered at The British Library in 2006. I am grateful for the invitation by the lecture committee to address the history of photography in India through the framework of debates concerning the history of the book. In connection with the logistics of the lectures and organis - ation of illustrations for the current book I’d sincerely like to thank Chris Michaelides and John Falconer. John Falconer’s seminal research on early photography in India needs also to be underlined. His immense labour and the generosity he has shown in sharing unpublished elements of it have contributed in a very fundamental manner to whatever I have been able to achieve in the present text. I wish also to express my appreciation of the quiet efficiency of the staff of the Africa and Asia reading room and the prints and drawings room in The British Library. The Panizzi Lectures provide an opportunity to focus on materials in The British Library, but as will be readily apparent I have also had recourse to other collections. Chief among these is the Alkazi Collection of Photography in Delhi, New York and London. In addi- tion to recording Ebrahim Alkazi’s foresight and generosity, I would like to note the invaluable assistance offered by Rahaab Allana, Esa Epstein and Stéphanie Roy Bharath. Thanks are also due to Howard and Jane Ricketts for generously showing me relevant parts of their collection and for permitting me to reproduce an image. Research in other archives has also fed into this project in various ways and I am grateful for the trouble taken by the staffs of the National Archive of India (Delhi), the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (Delhi) and the Special Collections room at Northwestern University Library. I was able to clarify my thinking about the central issues addressed here while in India under the auspices of a British [vii] 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page viii THE COMING OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN INDIA Academy Small Research Grant (autumn 2004) and Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship (spring 2006). During the course of the latter I had the pleasure of co-teaching a course with Jyotindra Jain at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I am grateful to him for his critical engagement and hospitality. I also benefited greatly from the com - ments of Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram, Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, Ravi Agarwal and Akshaya Tanaka. Sections of this material were also presented in other contexts at the University of Wisconsin Madison (where my hosts were Ken George and Kirin Narayan), Northwestern University (Sarah Fraser, Stephen Eisenman), University of Toronto (Deepali Dewan), University of Sussex (Alex Aisher), the SPS Media Workshop at the University of Cambridge (Georgina Born), the Duke University South Asia Consortium (Sandy Freitag and David Gilmour), Ohio State University (Aron Vinegar and Susan Huntingdon) and the University of Southern California (Janet Hoskins). I would also like to thank Rochana Mazumdar and Finbarr Barry Flood for sharing their unpublished work, and Elizabeth Edwards, Sunil Khilnani, Zirwat Chowdhury, Jacob Warren Lewis, Roman Stansberry, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kimberly Masteller, Parmjit Singh, Malavika Karlekar, Nasreen Rehman, Hemant Mehra, Rosie Thomas, Anita Herle, Haidy Geismar, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Kostis Kalantzis, Dilip Gaonkar, Robert Hariman, Julie Codell, Francesca Orsini, Clare Anderson, Radhika Singh and Sudeshna Guha. David Way, Head of Publications at The British Library, was a pleasure to deal with and John Trevitt’s editorial help was essential. Finally, as always, especial gratitude to Trudi, Robert and Thomas. [viii] 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page ix Abbreviations ACP Alkazi Collection of Photography BL The British Library BPS Bengal Photographic Society IOLR India Office Library Records JBPS Journal of the Bengal Photographic Society JPSB Journal of the Photographic Society of Bombay PSB Photographic Society of Bombay [ix] 01 pages i-x prelims:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:36 Page x 1 (left). ‘Don’t move or you won’t come out at all!’ The sitter’s anxious gaze directs our attention to the event – the encounter between this young woman and the photographer – that this image records. Carte-de-visite, c. 1880s (private collection). 2 (right). ‘Make me look like a proper king, he ordered. …’ Cabinet card c. 1870s- 1880s (private collection). 02 pages 001-050 chap 1:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:37 Page 1 Chapter 1 Photography as Cure No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. (Walter Benjamin, ‘A Little History of Photography’)1 IT IS YOUR FIRST TIME. Your father insisted. He almost forced you into the itinerant photographer’s enclosure. The photographer is distracted and mutters, pointing to the chair. He fiddles with the lens and adjusts the plate underneath the cloth. He isn’t happy about something and tells you to fold your hands on your lap, to look directly at the camera and remain very still. Don’t move or you won’t come out at all! You gaze at the machine, your body pinned in the chair, the solid base of a triangle whose sharp mysterious point is the glinting lens. It was a squeeze getting through the door and the photographer shouted at us as we scraped against his drapes with our swords. We started to unsheathe them but the photographer became angry, shouting that he didn’t want his studio cut to a thousand pieces. Pratapsingh sat in the throne and told the photographer to stop complaining and to get on with making the best picture he could. Make me look like a proper king, he ordered, and told us that we should all try and look like proper thakurs, not a bunch of adivasis. Angry, fierce, he said: feel the hot blood flowing in our veins, and get that in the picture, photoman. Full, strong picture, he shouted, some- thing to really scare the lower castes, so they would know who was the real boss. When they saw this picture they’d think twice about letting their shadow fall on a great man like Pratapsinghji. These imaginative reconstructions of picture-making events are [1] 02 pages 001-050 chap 1:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:37 Page 2 THE COMING OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN INDIA 3. Every element in this image which might be accounted a failure – the blurred elephant, the deep shadow in the foreground, the numerous scratches to the negative, simultaneously attest to the camera’s inability to exclude. Our assessment of it as a failure involves the imagination of a different, utopian, scenario that might have been placed in front of the camera. Everything here – within the protocols of photography – is entirely successful. Udaipur City Palace, c. 1880 (private collection). made possible by a particular quality of photography – its ‘data ratio’, ‘noise’ or ‘exorbitance’ – the recognition of which is central to the argument advanced in this book. Different media record differ- ent kinds of events. An image such as a painting is a record of an event, but primarily the event of the painter’s relation with the canvas. Paintings leave us physical traces, but they are the traces of the painter’s body, the position of a hand holding a brush as it leaves [2] 02 pages 001-050 chap 1:Layout 1 21/4/08 16:37 Page 3 PHOTOGRAPHY AS CURE a particular mark, an involuntary flick as an elbow flexed. Photo - graphs reflect the intentionalities and ideologies of their makers, just as paintings do. However, the photographic event is different, and for this reason photography’s ‘data ratio’ is quite unlike that of painting. As Roland Barthes writes, ‘in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography.’2 Because this argument is so critical to what follows – and not least becuase it differs from positions with which the current author has been associated in the past – it is crucial that it be expressly clearly.
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