Photography in South Asia

Abstract

A century and half on, the study of photography in South Asia remains in its infancy. Photography reached India in 1840, just a few months after its announcement in Europe, and by the 1850s, there were thriving photographic societies in Calcutta and Bombay. The 19th century generated a host of significant practitioners, Indian and British, who generated significant primary documentation. Most of this would remain undisturbed until the mid-1970s, when a slew of text-lite and picture-heavy anthologies started to appear. The colonial specificity of these images and practitioners has, for the most part, been the source of neutrality or even nostalgia rather than critical engagement, and the ongoing project of basic documentation has often been difficult to reconcile with theoretical ambition. The bulk of early documentation has been notable for its focus on the contents of official archives and for its Orientalism and “ornamentalism” (i.e., its fascination with the baubles of empire). Colonial landscape photography and broadly ethnographic images, together with portraits of Indian kings have, until recently, tended to crowd out other dimensions of photographic practice such as vernacular studio practice (of the kind which has come to dominate the critical response to West African photography, for instance). Photography in South Asia has largely been approached with a view to understanding what is “Indian” about it, and this has entailed a marginalization of historical complexity and process in order to make the cultural category of India more visible. One consequence of this is that the majority of writing on photography in India follows a one-way trajectory from the general case of photography to its specific (belated) iteration in India. A reverse movement then becomes difficult, and very little work on photography in India has contributed to broader discussions about photography as a world system. Given the intensity and scale of early photography in India, this is surprising. The earliest publications have been closely tied to their image sources and archives in which they are held. Initially, archives such as the India Office Collection played a strategically central role, supplemented by certain private collections. The entry of the largest private collection, Alkazi Collection of Photography in Delhi, into academic publishing has transformed the nature of critical engagement with early photography. The post-1970s literature was largely focused on documentary images from the previous century. Although a new literature (largely gallery commissioned catalogue texts) that engages art-practice photography is emerging, work by Indian documentary photographers in independent India has been very neglected, with several major global figures almost invisible in current literature. India’s sub-continental identity has recently become the site of productive debate. Partitioned into the Republic of India, West Pakistan, and East Pakistan (subsequently Bangladesh), British India has had a complex afterlife, both culturally and conceptually. While for some Indian art-photographers the colonial archive has been important as a citational reservoir, for others (such as documentary photographers associated with DRIK in Dhaka) “India” as a historical category has little resonance when compared to the global circuits and aesthetics within which they develop their practices.