Love in black and white

In 1947, as Partition ripped through the South Asian subcontinent, Bert Scott and his wife decided to leave India with their two young daughters. World War II had just ended, Independence was imminent and they weren’t quite sure how it would be for Anglo-Indians in the new era in the new India.

As violence engulfed the country, the family packed two large suitcases and prepared to move. The trunks contained the barest of essentials; among these more than 1,500 photographs that Scott had taken over the years during his stint as a photographer for The Times of India ( TOI ) in Mumbai and as a member of the Indian Army photographic unit.

Scott had photographed official ceremonies, the Mountbattens, Gandhi, Japanese positions behind enemy lines in Burma; he had also photographed, like everyone else, casual scenes from family life, social outings and gatherings. “They took their personal possessions and photos were some of the most precious things he had,” said Jason Scott Tilley, his grandson, who was recently in Mumbai to curate an exhibition as part of Focus Photography Festival (held in March). Tilley, who was born and lives in Coventry, is also a photographer.

The Scotts, Tilley’s maternal grandparents, had only ever lived in India, and like other Anglo-Indians born from mixed unions, this was the only home they had known.

Growing up, his grandparents’ memories of the country they had loved and left hung like a spectre through his childhood. “I’d always heard about India,” said Tilley. “India had been rammed down my throat since I was a child,” he added with a laugh. “So I got all my information from these black-and-white photos. That’s what stuck in my head.”

The family eventually settled down in the UK, and though Scott never worked as a photographer again, the pictures and memories were never entirely forgotten.

In 1999, for the first time since 1947, Tilley brought his grandfather back to this country. Scott was 85, and the trip came about on a whim. “It was over Sunday lunch I said ‘Why’d you never go back?’” said Tilley. “And he replied, ‘I don’t know really.’ I said jokingly, so do you want to? And he said he would love to.” Over two weeks the duo travelled to Mumbai and Bengaluru, some of the then octagenarian’s old stomping grounds.

Scott’s surviving pictures capture public life and private memories, alternating between the formal and the relaxed, glimpses of a national coming of age and the social life of a community. Tilley recounted some of the stories behind the collection; the home in Bengaluru that is now a hospital, a former girlfriend of his grandfather whom he lost touch with and who Tilley eventually traced to New Zealand.

Scott was born from a long line going back to a man who arrived in 1799 as an accountant for the East India Company, and married a local woman whose identity Tilley is yet to discover. Scott (1915-2002) trained in Bengaluru as a photographer before he began work in 1936 at TOI . “He landed a prime job,” said Tilley, “and he adored it. He was in the right place at the right time to photograph India.”

Scott later enlisted as a gunner in the war, and was promptly shifted to the photographic unit when they found out about his job. But soon after, the impending doom of Partition brought its own worries. “They were travelling through Partition, walking through streets strewn with dead bodies, and pretending that those people were asleep when they’d been hacked to death,” said Tilley. He recounted his grandfather speaking of helping Muslim men flee Hindu areas in Delhi, including one high-ranking Pathan. Later, when the Scotts were leaving the subcontinent, they were stranded in Karachi and surrounded by an angry mob threatening to decapitate the girls. They were waiting for instructions from their leader. When this leader arrived, it turned out to be someone Scott had helped escape from Delhi.

When they finally settled in Coventry in the UK, where they were classified as “displaced” people, they grew into their new lives, though Scott never got a job as a photographer. And India became another world, and another lifetime.

Tilley is also a photographer, and when he visited India with his grandfather first in 1999 and later in 2002 he shot several of his own photos that have since been exhibited. On this trip he curated ‘Masterji’, an exhibition of portraits taken by Maganbhai Patel, who moved to the UK in 1951 and captured immigrant life there.

Tilley said he was thrilled to be speaking about his family history in Mumbai, and that his grandfather would have been too. “I’ve never felt like I was a stranger here,” he said. “My family was ingrained in Indian society.”

Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based journalist

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