Imagine the Frame

Sociologist Malavika Karlekar uses archival photographs as texts to read the evolution of the colonial encounter between the British and the Bengali elite where the photograph, sometimes quotidian, posed, eventful or exploratory, contained crucial narratives, human dramas and intellectual vantage points. The bhadralok (genteel folk) were agitated with the self. They wrestled with change and tradition, loyalism and rebellion and searched for an ideal truth. The photograph became an icon, almost a sacred object in the pilgrimage to self-hood. For two noteworthy aficionados of photography, their passion for the camera even became a nationalist enterprise. Rajendralala Mitra, brilliant scholar and first Indian to join the Asiatic Society, challenged a racist colonial intellectual establishment through photographs of monuments. Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri’s (grandfather of Satyajit Ray) innovations in half tone screen printing were, according to Salman Rushdie, “stolen by the British”.

Revisioning the Past is a beautiful volume, rich with over a hundred evocative sepia images of individuals caught in a vortex of change. Karlekar unearths personal histories, traces social transformations, and even provides elucidations of fashion. The impressive Jnanadanandini Debi, Rabindranath Tagore’s eldest sister-in-law, sophisticated ‘companionate’ wife of Satyendranath Tagore ICS, helped invent the ‘brahmika’ sari with blouses designed like gowns. This was also a time, when “the family photograph was ritualised… family portraiture visually formalised familial hierarchies and patriarchal dominance within the bhadralok family.” Yet there was a kind of liberation around a photographer’s studio too. To have their pictures taken, ladies would need to come out of parda and risk not only a strange male gaze but also the gaze of an invisible public.

Significantly, there are few photographs showing Indians and Englishmen together except the odd one of the members of the Royal Commission on the decentralisation of India in which a stiff R.C. Dutt sits at the corner of a group of relaxed European men. In fact, one of the tiny corners of social commonality was the photographic studio. As visits to the new studios became increasingly popular, Karlekar’s contention that the photographic studio — such as Bourne and Shepherd or Johnston and Hoffman — as a place where racial and social divisions to some extent “melded”, simply in the existence of a common space in an increasingly segregated society, is an interesting discovery. “The Indian photographer of a European establishment would make a portrait of a tightlipped British bureaucrat in a three piece suit and within hours recommend the same background to the blushing child bride, wife of a first generation English educated Bengali lawyer.”

The winds of change were captured in the lens. The Indian National Congress had already been established in 1885. The Brahmo Samaj was growing and influential. Bethune College was established and Kadambini Ganguly had become one of the first two women doctors of the British Indian Empire. In a fast-changing society, the formal dressed up photograph was a bulwark as a well as a marker of transformation.

Revisioning the Past focusses on the “agency of the visual”, on the limits of written historiography, as in a whimsical discussion of the photo of “two men and a piano” and points to how the photograph becomes the very touchstone of middle class life. In the corpus of the written word Revisioning the Past attempts an intimate “seeing” of the “truth” and looks through the skin of the bhadra samaj. Perhaps when the genteel folk saw themselves so exactly and ceremoniously captured, they were comforted about the tempests in their hearts and minds and led gently down the path of self-belief.