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Gate
of Jamu Masjid Mosque. Lahore, India. 1860.
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In “Three Princes With Attendants,”
three young Central Indian princes, perhaps from Gwalior, pose with two
attendants, with the youth on the very right blurred by the long exposure.
According to Ms. Hutton, “The lavishness of the studio setting speaks to the
success that Dayal had achieved by that point in time.”
Other images in the exhibition
include prints by a handful of photographers and amateurs who worked in India
during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not long after the East India
Company replaced the Mughals as the main power in the north and when rule was
subsequently given to the queen of England. These men, some of whom were
doctors, took quickly to photography, which was rapidly replacing painting as
the primary tool for portraiture and documentation, not long after its
invention in Europe.
“The majority of South Asia scholars
focus on ancient Indian sculpture and painting, but India’s traditions of
modern art are becoming new grist for study and are of greater interest to the
large collecting and museum-going public,” said Marika Sardar, associate
curator of Southern Asian and Islamic art at the San Diego Museum of Art. “In
that way, people are looking more at the practice of photography and its
importance in the changing world of 19th-century India.”
For one, photographers at the time
were encouraged by each other and by the British raj. And not only was there
widespread promotion of the new tools of the trade — daguerreotype cameras were
advertised in Calcutta a year after their invention in France — but
photographic societies in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were beginning to pop up
from the 1850s onward.
And, according to the Bubbar
catalog, “With these societies developed communities that organized events,
exhibitions and the publication of journals, fostering an active culture of
experimentation and exchange.”
The exhibition includes works by
members of those societies, like Dr. John Murray, a teacher and principal of
the medical school in Agra, who took up photography around 1849 and began
participating in the Photographic Society of Bengal in 1856. At that time, the
colonial administration began employing photographers to conduct surveys to document
and preserve India’s monuments as well as military sites, specifically after
the uprising of 1857. It was with this intention, perhaps, that Dr. Murray was
asked by Governor-General Lord Canning to photograph myriad locations related
to that uprising, as in an 1858 image of cannonballs in front of the Pearl
mosque in Agra.
Similarly, in 1863, John and James
Nicholas, who together were known as the Nicholas Brothers, Photographers of
Madras, established a studio and concentrated on the South Indian landscape.
They produced such works as, “Madura, No. 6. A Passage in the Temple” and
“Seringapatam. Mausoleum Erected Over Tippoo Sultan and Haider Ali.” The
latter, according to the Bubbar catalog, is an example of a site that
interested the British.
One gem in the show, Mr. Bubbar
said, is the later Man Ray portrait of Yashwant Rao II Holkar Bahadur,
maharajah of Indore.
“He was a gifted and
highly sensitive Indian prince, not merely one following the latest
fashion,” Mr. Bubbar said. “Man Ray photographed him and his wife on numerous
occasions. The image marks a high point of exchange, a cultural
encounter.”
Mr. Bubbar, who added that he had
been working on curating this show “subconsciously for at least five years,”
hopes that with his exhibition he can shed light on an important chapter of
Indian history and art.
“The show is a survey of the
photographic medium in India from 1855 to 1930, highlighting some key moments,”
he said. “I am hoping that people walk away with a sense of the medium’s
history, its beauty and its relevance.”
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