Abstract
Capturing the world around us to understand and explain it has many inducements and possibilities, although they yet leave us with a sense of incompleteness. That is what we experience with words when we talk or write, or with arts, such as sculpture and painting. Do we just capture it as it is, or as we think it should be, has always been the problem or conundrum. It has not been resolved, and it will never be. This explains why art will always remain an engagement with the world and with itself. Photography became one such engagement in the nineteenth century which drew the attention of society in a significant way and India too was decisively touched by it. Its colonial connection was a historical fact and Christopher Penn’s sumptuous book, which illustrates the work of A.T.W. Penn and his association with the Nicholas Brothers as a photographer in Madras in the latter half of the nineteenth century unfolds that fact eloquently. That the photographer was the great-grandfather of the author and orchestrator of the photographs of the book lends greater intimacy and credence to this splendid volume.
The book gives a vivid account of the craft, science and activities of the Nicholas Brothers and J.T.W. Penn in Madras and south India. They worked at a time when technology of photography was itself in a flux and they participated in it. The photographs unveil a rich mosaic of the photographers’ interests, predilections as well their clientele. For, any art, even photography, was always tied to the compulsions of power and market. The subjects that their photographs sought to capture and sell clearly are the stuff which constitute Orientalism and they were used by newspapers in India, such as The Madras Times, The Madras Mail, The Bangalore Spectator and The South India Observer. They had eminent clientele from among visiting royalty, the governors, the generals of the army, the maharajas and so on. Their works were used with profit by explorers and interpreters of Indian art and architecture as well as of Indian people and races. Their terrain was vast and varied, touching many beckoning seductions and idiosyncrasies of nature or the monuments and sculptures of which south India offered a rich fare. They touch the cities of Madras and Pondicherry or the beaches and catamarans there, as if to juxtapose or contrast civilisation with nature.
But the cities that were there in south India, other than what colonialism had conjured up—the cities that mirrored India, her history, religion and her different ethos and moods—were captured by our photographers with élan. The Rockfort in Trichinopoly frowning at the heavens or gleaming in reflection in the pellucid temple tank, the soaring temple towers of Srirangam, Madurai, Chidambaram and Thanjavur, their massive structures and corridors, the jostling sculptures they accommodate or the pathetic shacks they are surrounded with. There are the famous ‘Seven Pagodas’ of Mahabalipuram, the rock face depicting the penance of Arjuna, temples excavated in solid granite and temples built out of hard, recalcitrant stone. They are the paeans to Hindu religiosity, as is the procession car with its grotesque lion-seat at the Chamundi temple (written as Charmandi) at Mysore or the colossal stone sculpture of Siva’s Bull in the Chamundi Hill, which a pious devotee literally looks up to. The Summer Palace of Tipu at Srirangapattanam is there too with its ornamental pillars and arches, a reminder of the conquest so famously made.
But the terrain of the photographers is naturally extended to Ooty or Ootacamund, where the government shifted its seat for the rulers to beat the heat. It is a place of rolling hills and sprawling lakes, of swaying trees and gurgling waterfalls, of agreeable climate and dignified distance. It is also a transformed terrain, of new plantations, of churches of quiet magnificence as in England like St. Stephen’s Church, of St. Thomas Church and of the fine aqueduct, reminding us of the Roman grandeur—all mirroring the civilised presence of the rulers there. However, the bullock carts are conspicuously there too, to nudge us to notice how a new civilisation is visibly overlaid on an old, squalid and creaking one. As if to reinforce the idea as to what the place was really like before new rulers and hunters arrived on the scene, there is a photograph of ‘The Tiger’s Cave’, desolate, yet articulate in its muteness. As a sequel, as it were, under the category, ‘Nilgiri Game’, is shown the tiger, the bison, the hyena and the sambar, all shot and laid low by the new masters of the place. But the working primitiveness of India, of man and beast alike, is on show too, like basket-makers, ‘664 Mysore block-wheel cart’ and ‘Bheestie’ (water-carrier).
Nicholas & Co. and A.T.W. Penn have trained their cameras on capturing the ethnographical opulence in Ootacamund and south India. The Todas take the cake with their hirsute presence and the cave-like huts they seem to have patented. They have since been museumised and no tour of Ooty is complete without a mandatory peep into their preserved exoticism. The photographers have identified specific human groups of south India, such as ‘Thears, Malabar’, ‘Pariahs, Malabar’ and ‘Nairs, Malabar’, each group rendered complete with its share of women of uncovered bosom. The others, such as the ‘Wudders’, Todas, the ‘Malabar fishers’, the Nilgiri tribals, ‘Canaresse women’ or ‘Canaresse men’, are yet presented in their primitive glory, their clumsy clothes notwithstanding. Clearly, such photographers were participating in the production of ethnographical stereotypes, collaborating with the burgeoning ‘castes and tribes’ studies, census exercises and production of gazetteers and manuals. The models and idioms of Indian primitivism were not only a subject of study and negotiation but also a statement of stark contrast with the civilising presence of the British.
There are also some eloquent illustrations of the seamier side of colonial rule. The famine of 1877 gets amply projected in some of the photographs. One of Penn’s photographs has a sardonic title, ‘A chosen few’; it is a heap of skeletons, yet alive. Another photo has a caption ‘A corner of the Pettah Kitchen, Bangalore—3,000–4,000 people waiting for feeding time, 1877. He also had to follow the journey of Viceroy, Lord Lytton, insulated as he was from the reproachful scenarios around. A more eloquent rebuke against famine management was the photograph of W.W. Hooper, ‘The Madras Beach covered with rice during the famine, 1877’, which William Digby, the editor of The Madras Times, used in his work on the subject to damn the official callousness. The photographs seemed more effective in their silent impeachment than all the descriptions, arguments and statistics.
The volume on the Photographers of South India is replete with rich information of the photographers and the science and craft they pursued. But the photographs there, choreographed into an impressive picture gallery, are more eloquent and successful in recreating the world and mood of the times. The selection of the subject and the way the photographers chose to see the world of nature and culture necessarily reflect the discourse within which they operated, knowingly or unknowingly. In the process, they were also creating certain patterns of knowledge in which power relations perforce got attached to their work. It is far too easy to dismiss the whole thing as a work of external conspiracy. Subjectification is an aspect of subjugation and when it enters into the process of knowledge production, the best way to deal with it is not to complain about it but to understand it. In fact, by doing so, we will be participating in the knowledge production too.