India’s Earliest Photographs

Three Princes With Attendants. Indore, Central India. Circa 1894.

For someone who ended up with the title “Bold Warrior of Photography,” Raja Deen Dayal started out rather cautiously. Instead of quitting his job as a surveyor at the Public Works Department in Indore, India, once he discovered photography in the 1870s, he waited about a decade before taking a two-year furlough to see if he could handle it.

“I suspect he took the two years off to see if he could be successful as a full-time photographer before resigning his position,” said Deborah Hutton, an associate professor of art history at the College of New Jersey and a co-author of “Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-Century India.”

It seemed to work. He became so successful as a full-time photographer that he never returned. Instead, he traveled India, eventually opening up his own commercial studios in Indore, Secunderabad and Bombay, creating over 30,000 images from 1878 until his death in 1905. Meanwhile, he earned the title of Raja Musavvir Jung (loosely translated as Bold Warrior of Photography) from the sixth nizam of Hyderabad, for whom he was a court photographer, before landing a royal warrant by Queen Victoria in the late 1890s.

Works by Dayal are some of the many on view in a new exhibition titled “The New Medium: Photography in India 1855-1930,” a show that runs through July 10 at the Prahlad Bubbar gallery in London.