The collection contains impressive material relating to nineteenth-century South Asia, including territories now covered by present-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. All were at one stage or another brought under British colonial rule; consequently, the development of photography in the region from the mid-1850s was inevitably impacted by British photographers and imperial government policy.
Numbering over 4,500 single prints from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the collection documents the people, social customs, religious practices, architecture, and landscapes of the subcontinent governed under the princely state of the British Raj, which ended with Indian independence in 1947.
Albums of photography in India tend to be constructed either by British colonial officials or were made by British and domestic studios for sale to British occupiers, tourists, or to the native hierarchy. These include the H. M. Pratt album, compiled by a member of the Bengal Staff Corps, including portraits of officers fighting along British India’s Northwest Frontier; or the Views in India album compiled by Captain Edward Walker, consisting of images of Hindu temples and Islamic tombs in Southern India. A significant exception is the photography in India of the French geographer and explorer, Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet, of whose work the GRI has acquired a substantial collection, including his publications and travel diaries.
The devastating environmental consequences of empire are recorded in albums documenting late Victorian droughts and plague in India, with photographs by Captain C. Moss and Willoughby Wallace Hooper respectively. Significant albums by Indian photographers include those by Lala Deen Dayal of Stupa I at Sanchi, and an album of portraits of the family of Srinivasa Rao Sahib, the 10th Jagir of Ārani. The Himalayan territories of Bhutan and Sikkim are represented in an important early twentieth-century album of photographs by the British Political Officer, John Claude White.
A small, but important collection of nineteenth-century photographs relating to present day Afghanistan includes the British Occupation of Kandahar album, compiled by the Irish surgeon, Benjamin Simpson, as well as further collections of material from the Second Afghan War by the photographer, John Burke, and the Photography School of the Bengal Sappers and Miners. A large collection by the latter covering northern Afghanistan is included in an album compiled by Captain Maxwell Hyslop. Selections of photographs from other parts of British India include an album of photographs from Burma (Myanmar) compiled by Lieutenant Atkinson, a British officer stationed in Rangoon (Yangon) or Mandalay.
There is a growing collection of photographically-illustrated books relating to South Asia, mostly written by British historians and colonial officials. These include important nineteenth-century volumes by Richard Banner Oakeley, Melville Clarke, James Fergusson, J. Forbes Watson, and John William Kaye (including a full set of The People of India), and the collector for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Henry Hardy Cole.
The GRI’s collection is complemented by holdings of South Asian photography in the J. Paul Getty Museum, much of it contained in albums, including a large body of work in India by Felice Beato.
Image: Lala Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905). Stūpa at Sānchi, view of torana (gateway). 1882. Albumen print. Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.21.