A recently-concluded
exhibition of rare images from the 1857 Uprising drew fascinated response
from its Delhi visitors. Curator Rahaab Allana on the
stories the camera doesn’t know it’s telling
A photograph from
the Durbar of 1903 reveals a group of veterans from the 2nd Gorkha Regiment,
all of them adorned with medals of valour and some with undress stripes:
the Medal of Gallantry, the Mutiny Medal and other decorations indicating
service in military campaigns such as the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80)
and the Kabul-Kandahar March (1880).
|
Mutiny
Veterans at the Delhi Durbar: Unknown
photographer, 1903 |
Peering into the
lens on the photographer’s instruction, this troop is immortalised
forever by the play of light upon negative film. Piercing eyes hound
the lens, transmitting unrest through the gaze of the ‘ordinary’
soldier. Here, the notion of ‘victory’ is challenged by
the uncertain nature of the Uprising’s aftermath. Evidently, the
British preferred to employ militia from the outlying regions of the
Empire in order to suppress the ‘mutiny’, i.e. from the
northeast and the Punjab, as they shared no fraternity with the rebel
sepahis from Delhi, Avadh and Kanpur. This band of soldiers represents,
with a certain irony, the involvement of British regiments of mainly
Indian or native soldiers in suppressing the Uprising. For Karl Marx,
however, the photograph would have meant the beginning of the collapse
of the Crown, for he strongly believed: “The outrages committed
by the mutinous Sepoys in India [are] only the reflex, in a concentrated
form, of England’s own conduct in India.”
The camera captured
these ‘outrages’, but more significantly, though perhaps
unwittingly, offered several segments of society in the early 20th century
a sense of self-identity. Professional and amateur photographers like
John Nicholas Tressider (1818-89), the Kanpur Civil Surgeon during the
Uprising, have left elaborate albums that visualise the affected regions,
including the hanging of several suspected ‘criminals’ of
the ‘rebellion’. The Tressider album also provides a sensitive
and ardent view of civil society in one of the cities hardest-hit during
the event, a place that was considered thereafter synonymous with ‘native
brutality’. Tressider was perhaps the first photographer to experiment
with the photographic collage. In his work, he often juxtaposes images
of his European colleagues with those of his ‘native acquaintances’,
as he calls them, and by placing them visually on the same plane, suggests
a quite anachronistic negation of colonial hierarchy.
|
Memorial
Well, Kanpur: Samuel
Bourne, 1865 |
| |
A
tangible relationship emerges in
the 19th century between photography
and military expansion |
Felice Beato (1834-c.1907),
also known as the first ‘war photographer’, owing in part,
to his images of the Crimean War, engages in India in a large venture
to record all the significant sites affected by the ravages of 1857,
illustrating landscapes of a decaying dynasty, fading away before the
onslaught of the British victory. Certain sites, therefore, achieved
iconic status through repeated representations that drew on memories
of siege: Kashmere Gate in Delhi, the Residency complex in Lucknow,
and the Sati Chowra Ghat in Kanpur. Preserved carefully as a memorial
to the British, these sites were photographed throughout the 19th and
20th centuries.
Beato first emerged
on the Indian scene in February 1858. His collections became easier
to circulate as the technique of the albumen print evolved at the end
of the 1850s, facilitating the production of multiple copies. When Felice
Beato, Samuel Bourne and others laid their images out as albums, they
also laid out the potential for resurrecting recollections of the Uprising,
both for the participants of the event and the English public. By evoking
these memories for families and military men, they were able to satisfy
the interests and imagination of the British, recreating for the colonisers
a moment of catastrophe but a triumph nonetheless won.
|
Execution
Of Rebels: Felice Beato, 1858 |
In the Photographic
Society’s annual exhibition of 1858, Beato exhibited a number
of his alluring works, including magnificent panoramas of Lucknow and
Delhi. A reviewer for the Photographic Society’s journal stated:
“… the views of public buildings and localities in the city
connected forever with the chivalry of Havelock, the success of Outram
and Clyde, are most striking and memorable… these admirable views
give us in fact the pictorial romance of this terrible war. They are
necessary, as our contemporaries say, to an understanding of the war
now, and will be indispensable to its future historians.”
|
Kashmere Gate, Delhi: Samuel Bourne, 1857 |
| |
We
must question the role of the Indian in
these images, and his
unacknowledged part
as a silent spectator
or subject |
A tangible relationship
emerges in the 19th century between photography and military expansion,
the ‘showing’ and ‘controlling’ of land. But there
are fissures through which the visual always negotiates what is seen,
what is stated and what actually happened. If we shift focus from the
visual representations of an event to the means utilised to obtain them,
we arrive at a vantage point beyond the mere appearance of life during
the Uprising. In understanding the medium as a viable and dynamic mode
that effects its own manipulations of time and event, often a very different,
even divergent, story emerges about the narratives of unrest, retribution
and memorialisation in the Uprising’s aftermath. Images from the
period inform us about alternative regimes of power and hegemony that
can control the actions and reactions of a public in spite of early photography’s
serious technical limitations. (The camera, for instance, was unable to
capture large crowds or moving objects.) And so, within the context of
a ‘photo-survey’ of 1857, we must also question the role of
the Indian, who often played an unacknowledged part, entering history,
as a silent spectator or object.
As there are travelogues,
there will also be the accompanying ‘photologue’ that might
subsume notions of time and history in order to reveal the nature of
human understanding. The exhibition, ‘On Hallowed Ground: Aftermath
of the Uprising, 1857’, presented by the Alkazi Foundation for
the Arts in collaboration with the India International Centre, was an
effort to elucidate the imagistic life of the Uprising as evidence and
memory because in those battles of identity and space, the dead have
no dominion… except remembrance today.
Allana is the curator of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts
