Analogue diaries

It’s like walking into a darkroom. Except the vinegary odour of chemicals — which should hit your nose before your eyes can adjust to the darkness, away from the noonday sun — never accosts you. You’re greeted instead by the steady gaze of a life-sized Gujarati or Parsi matron. The hyperreality of her painted maroon sari and the chintz upholstery of the chair she is resting her arm upon, spectacular against her impassive, black-and-white face.

Sharing a corner of the twin galleries at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) with her are others more elaborately dressed; their calm countenance belie the weight of the royal finery and heavy jewels they don. Embellished with sequins or painted over to include Palladian columns or deities (in images from Nathdwara in Rajasthan, for instance), this unlikely durbar of men and women who may have never crossed each other’s path in their lifetime, is the opening act of ‘Drawn from Light: Early Photography and the Indian Sub-continent’; a pictorial pageantry audacious in both intent and scope.

And it is here, under the watchful eye of the Maharana of Udaipur and the Begum of Bhopal, that curator Rahab Allana guides a motley crew of dreadlocked backpackers and eager students, journalists and amateur photographers through 150-odd years of photographic history in India, Nepal, Burma and Sri Lanka. Coddling a rare daguerreotype — the first photographic prototype that used a copper plate covered with a layer of finely polished silver to ‘fix’ an image — in his white gloved hands like a magician’s, Allana talks of the intersection of art and photography in the late 19th and early 20th century. The beady eyes of his audience though, follow the daguerreotype of Henry Marsham Havelock-Allan, his breast bereft yet of the Victoria Cross he would win seven years later in 1857. Perhaps, a last airing for this prized likeness of Havelock-Allan that straddled the private and the public space for 164 years — from a personal memento to a ‘common’ exhibit — the daguerreotype will finally retire to the privacy of a vault. Its copper plates stolen away even from the cautious 60W lighting and the hum of dehumidifiers in museums and galleries like this one.

The women though, with the exception of courtesans and nautch girls in Ram Rehman’s images from Lucknow, or in gilded frames that never left the palace grounds of the royals, rarely transcend the private. And nowhere is this more evident than in amateur photographer Darogah Abbas Ali’s An Illustrated Historical Album of the Rajahs and Talukdars of Oudh (1880), with 250 photo cards, including some where the faces of women are stamped over by medallions. A purdah of finality that none could breach in over a century.

Trailing at the end of a shifting tailback of visitors, the curator’s voice unhurried and reverential, you pause to take in the objectified beauty of a Tamil girl in Sri Lanka or the brutal crucifixion of dacoits in a village in Burma by war photographer Felice Beato. You also wonder at the power of the medium that allowed lensmen from the West to enter Nepal then ruled by the Ranas, famously wary of foreigners and colonial invasion. It is here, in this mountain kingdom, that the shift from early photography by military and medical officers to commercial photographers from the West and locals is best illustrated. Kathmandu is still home to studios run by a community of chitrakars (scroll painters) taken to Europe by the king to learn the art of painting with light.

If the portraits are about the subject, about the distance between the lens and its muse, landscape photography in the region largely appears to be about the photographer. What he (and it’s always a man) sees or chooses to show is what you see. Dr John Murray, a civil surgeon in the East India Company besotted by Mughal architecture, shot the first high-contrast, waxed-paper images of the Taj Mahal in the mid-19th century, the lines clinical and orderly. Some of his photos also led historian Abha Kaul to the ‘discovery’ of 50-odd Mughal gardens between the Taj and Agra Fort, now lost forever. Others like William Johnson, a civil servant in Bombay, chronicled the arrival of the early migrants to the city, Kamathis and Goan Christians, Banias of Surat and ‘Brahmans of Dakhan’, sans stereotyping. Murray, Johnson and Samuel Bourne (who set up one of the first commercial studios in India, in Calcutta), were part of complex and extensive photographic cultures that first developed in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

But perhaps the most interesting pictorial mapping of the era can be traced to Captain Alexander Greenlaw of the 46th Madras Infantry. A linguist, who saw Hampi and Vijayanagara with a modern eye, he often shot his subject matter from a low angle to allow the sense of grandeur to pervade the frame. To let it grow and rise like a living, breathing object unaware of its own power and beauty. The stiffness of documentary photography conspicuous by its absence, at a time when formality and posturing was the common patina in portraits and landscapes. And it is within this frame of reference that one sees Greenlaw’s uncommon spirit, his sense of humour, as he creates what is probably the world’s first visual cryptograph — where the artist is concealed and revealed in his own work. Perched in a two-storey pavilion in Vijayanagara, Greenlaw appears to wink at Alfred Hitchcock decades ahead.

Caught between such timelessness and the yellowing skies of POP, salt and albumen prints, the visitors soon disperse, some still trying to get the curator’s attention. Others clicking photos with a ‘fixed’ iPad against a painted studio backdrop. Or peering through old Stereocard Viewers that merge 2D images into 3D. A lone woman leafs through carbon prints of Parsi lensman Shapoor N Bheedwar, staged and styled like the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, who was setting up his own studio in Calcutta at the time... It’s a perfect picture. A quiet chaos of reversals and counter-reversals played out in a darkroom. A room where no one can tell who’s watching who.

‘Drawn from Light’ runs till September 30 (Mondays closed) at IGNCA, Delhi .

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