This is another beautifully produced volume from the Alkazi Collection. The selection has been made from the photographic archive built up by Sir John Marshall, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) from 1902 to 1928. At first glance we see historic buildings in timeless isolated grandeur. There are a few frozen family groups and many empty excavation sites where the presence of an Indian assistant recalls the human scale and the blur of an errant cow reminds us of the long exposure times required by the silver gelatin method. A generation before Marshall, Rajendralala Mitra in his photographically illustrated Antiquities of Orissa, quoting, or slightly misquoting, Sir Thomas Browne expressed the baffled wonder and uncertainty of meaning evoked by these ancient monuments: “Oblivion reclineth semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanic erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller, as he passeth amazedly through those deserts, asketh of her who builded them: and she mumbleth something, but what it is, he heareth not”. The accompanying essays in the present volume, though not as elegant as the photographs, avoid the esoteric extremes of some current photographic writing. But they succeed admirably, not just in slaying old positivist foes, but, as Sudeshna Guha puts it, in encouraging critical reflection on the histories of early India created by archaeology and presented through its photographs. To whom were they addressed? How were they to be ‘read’, and who had the authority to ‘read’ them?
At first, visual representations were addressed to European eyes. Michael Dodson shows how the writing of South Asian archaeology from 1600 to 1860 struggled to reconcile Indian knowledge with Christian revelation. In this burgeoning development of world history a hierarchy of civilisations was conceived which could implicitly justify Britain's ‘civilizing mission’. The beginnings of biblical archaeology in the Middle East were central to this orientalist shift from textual to material culture, as they were inspirational also for the nationalist scholar Rajendralala Mitra.
Thus, modern archaeology came late to India. The department to which General Alexander Cunningham was appointed in 1861 had a fitful existence until Lord Curzon refounded the ASI in 1902. While in Europe nationalism drove the impetus to discover and create a past, a colonial government had a different and less compelling agenda: to discipline curiosity and show the world as well as educated Indians that it was an enlightened custodian of the Indian past. By contrast, photography flourished from its earliest days. It answered the needs of the developing modern state; by 1855 photography was on the curriculum for military cadets at Addiscombe. In the same year, the Company told its Indian governments that for recording antiquities it should replace draughtsmen with photographers for reasons of ‘perfect accuracy’ and economy. Guha shows us how archaeology and architecture were integral parts of Curzon's presentation of imperial rule. However, the use of photography to propagate images of authority was less easy to control. The ownership of cameras spread through the developing urban civil society; in 1863 the Photographic Society of Bengal had nearly 250 members, including Indians. Its protean character, as Guha and Christopher Pinney remind us, left open alternative interpretations. This, of course, was well shown by the Gaekwar incident at the 1911 Coronation Durbar. The Illustrated London News published a page of stills to let readers judge for themselves whether the prince's demeanour had been deliberately insulting.
The biography from ruin to monument of the Sanchi Stupa, the most phographed Indian structure of the nineteenth century, is the subject of a fascinating contribution by Tapati Guha-Thakurta. The dominant British figures were Marshall's forerunner, Alexander Cunningham, who strenuously continued the move from textual to material evidence in his obsession with Buddhist antiquities, well received in Protestant Britain; and James Fergusson, the architectural historian, who shared Cunningham's concern for accurate on-site drawing. But Fergusson also saw the potential for photography and began to build up a huge archive. Guha-Thakurta draws attention to the painful contrast between the care given to the storage of visual reproductions in London and the neglect and dispersal of the wonderful Amaravati sculptures. However, the tide was turning. The proposal to move the Sanchi Stupa gateways to London, prevented only by the 1857 rebellion, was later described by the British government as an “act of vandalism”. It is often forgotten that many important monuments were in Indian states, in this case Bhopal. The author shows that by Marshall's time the ASI adopted a more diplomatic approach. But Bhopal's claim to ownership was in turn challenged by the Mahabodhi Society. Sanchi reached its modern status in the age of Deen Dayal's photographs and Marshall's concern for the conservation and presentation of the complex site, not the stupa alone, with an accompanying museum.
In this context, Christopher Pinney asks fundamental questions about what a “Buddhist photography” might mean. The pilgrim, performing pradakshina, would pass along the terraces around the curve of the domed stupa and try to read the continuous, not sequential, narratives of the carved Jatakas. By contrast, the camera produces a flat image from a fixed position. Pinney pursues his theme with contrasts between the picture frame and the screen of a film, and between the remarkable Jataka images produced by Henry Cousens and the panoramic photographs of Marshall which place Sanchi in a wider reality.
Our understanding of the background to this collection is further enhanced by Robert Harding's chapter on the history of excavations at Rajgir and Taxila showing that Marshall's relationship with the work of Cunningham was one of continuity as well as dialectical engagement. With so much expert guidance on the history of the understanding and visual presentation of India's early past, it is strange that there is no mention by any of the authors of the dispute between Fergusson and Rajendralala Mitra. Perhaps its very intensity would draw attention away from the principal focus of the Albums. But the controversy illustrates the major theme set out by Guha of how photography, so useful to archaeology, at the same time undermined monolithic claims to authority and facilitated alternative histories of ancient India.
Mitra, who became the first Indian president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, had acknowledged James Fergusson as the “highest authority on Indian architecture”, but challenged his view that the earliest forms, at least before contact with the Greeks, were only in wood. Fergusson claimed such expertise in reading photographs that he could place a building within fifty miles of its site and fifty years of its construction. But in matters of interpretation, whose reading was to be preferred? And who was able to judge between the arguments for wood or stone in remote antiquity? Photography meant that an informed opinion was no longer limited to those able to visit distant sites. Fergusson's Archaeology in India with especial reference to the works of Babu Rajendralala Mitra appealed to readers in Britain and felt obliged to invoke extraneous claims to authority. He warned them that Mitra was a type of superficially clever Bengali who, if able to come to London, would take all the places in the Indian Civil Service examinations and return home to sit in judgement in criminal cases involving Europeans. The book appeared two years after the Ilbert Bill of 1882 which proposed removing an anomaly whereby Indian magistrates could try Europeans in the presidency cities but not in the countryside. It was British India's Dreyfus case; all educated opinion, British and Indian, was divided and catalysed by the poison of the Ilbert debate. Two years later, too, the Indian National Congress was founded. If it was the defining moment for Liberal Imperialists, the Fergusson-Mitra debate raised the same questions of entitlement and authority when judging the visual presentation of India's past. The evidence of the camera was available to all. Fergusson could only hope to prevail through personal and racist abuse.
In this light, it is not surprising to read in Guha's chapter on Marshall's photography an account of Marshall's testy response to Indian officials who were tenacious in interpretations different from his own. When they appealed to a wider audience by publishing in newspapers, he did not hesitate to discipline them. Though he himself wrote about his Mohenjodaro excavations in the Illustrated London News, seeking to present the Indus Valley Civilisation and his work to an international audience made receptive by a generation of impresario archaeologists, Schliemann, Marshall's first chief Sir Arthur Evans, Sir Leonard Woolley and Howard Carter. By contrast with his organisational achievements, Marshall did not leave a cadre of Indian successors. Mortimer Wheeler thought him “personally brilliant but a tree under which nothing grew”. After a decade and a half of scholarships and training programmes, he could still doubt Indians’ judgement when it came to architecture, as he reported in Indian Archaeological Policy, 1915. Guha, quoting his later acknowledgement of Indian resentment at “the idea of essentially national work being delegated to foreigners”, seems to hint at a dawning change of attitude. However, the example of E.B. Havell shows that it was quite possible to be both a paternalist in politics and a radical champion of Indian art. Nevertheless, as Guha makes clear, Marshall's reputation was not undeserved. Despite his years at Taxila, he may not have been a great excavator, though he did set an example of prompt publication. But he created a national organisational structure – fractured, as was so much else, at Partition - with conservation at the top of the agenda, and well-ordered records with a library and a massive archive of photographs, a sample of which has been so interestingly presented in this volume. lionelknight@gmail.com.
