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Cameras replaced paintbrushes and transformed the art of portraiture in India. Naturally, the princes were among the earliest patrons. Fortunately, many of these early portraits are either held privately or are with the descendants of former princely states Pramod Kumar KG
With its arrival in India in 1840, photography soon became a rival to the position of the traditional miniature artist and portrait painter as it was able to capture a sitter and proceedings with visual exactitude. Royal portrait Understanding portrait photography in India constitutes the study of royal photography, most of which were shot as portraits. These were often in the form of formal portraits of rulers, their families, heirs to the throne with their siblings, friends, and sometimes with retainers and attendants. The ruler performing his kingly duties at court, with visitors, or at hunts, necessitated his portraits being taken. Contrary to generally-held views, photographs were also sometimes taken within the cloistered confines of the zenana. First photograph One of the first photographs of a ruler in India was possibly taken by the first European war photographer in Asia, Dr John Mcosh. His portrait of the boy ruler of Punjab, Maharaja Duleep Singh, son of the legendary Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was taken at Lahore possibly in 1848 or 1849. A surviving calotype, recently published, shows the young Maharaja in profile, seated on a chair in full court dress. Subsequently, photographs of him during his exile in Britain show him dressed both as an Englishman, with and without his turban, and dressed in formal Indian court costume for formal occasions.
Portraits in print A growing global publishing empire, that devoured all material that emanated from the "jewel" in the British crown, was soon to have its impact on photography. The royal portrait, till then chiefly created as an art form or out of curiosity for this new medium, soon came to be circulated as a gift. A curious public in the West, entrenched in the Orientalist mode, was fertile ground for the mass circulation of the image. The political agenda of establishing the absorption of India into the British Empire was also furthered by this. The quelling of the uprising of 1857 set in motion two distinct objectives. One, to try and understand the people of India by studying their castes and tribes, and two, to prove to the world and to the public back home that India had been calmed and co-opted successfully into the benevolent rule of the Raj. A common factor in both was photography.
People of India James Waterhouse’s work, though commissioned for the London International Exhibition, reached too late to be included in it. However, it found use in eight volumes of the People of India series commissioned by the-then governor-general of India, Lord Charles Canning. Published a few years after 1857, the eight volumes of the book are "widely acknowledged to be among the most important nineteenth century attempt to harness photography to the service of ethnographic documentation." The eight volumes, though ethnographic in scope, did not shirk from making several political points.
Prince of Wales’ tour The tour in 1875 of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, of India was commemorated by the publication of a Royal Photographic album of scenes and personages connected with H.R.H. the Prince of Wales’ Tour in India, 1876. The book, compiled by the leading photographic studio of the time, Bourne and Shepherd, was the work of an unknown photographer and included a series of portraits of Indian rulers along with documentation of the halts and the palaces and places visited. Princely India In a significant departure from collections held outside India, examining untampered photographic records of over 150 years from a princely state is an extraordinary exercise that throws up unexpected treasures and genuine surprises. Udaipur, the capital of Mewar, the pre-eminent state of Rajputana in British India, is today the repository of one of the largest photographic archives in India. My research into the archives, now collectively known as the Pictorial Archives of the Maharanas of Mewar, began in early 2008. It has more than 30,000 prints from the 1850s onwards that have been collected during the rule of five successive Maharanas of Mewar. The archive thus provides us with a unique opportunity to view the evolution of photography within a geographical region in India.
The archives, a mix of photographic materials from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, is well represented by a variety of material, ranging from glass-plate negatives, albumen, gelatin silver and platinum prints, card-mounted photographs, photo-montages, and painted photographs. The collection also includes cameras and photographic equipment from this period. Painting on photos Hand-tinting and painting details in photographic portraits seem to have been practised widely in Princely India. Individual and group portraits were deftly filled in with colour, pre-empting colour photography by several decades. The evidence provided by existing painted daguerreotypes, and subsequently the vast numbers of painted photographs in the albumen and gelatin silver processes, clearly inform us that painting on photographs as a style came in fairly early in India, perhaps within the first decade of the arrival of photography in India. European flavour Portraits as display objects for the increasing number of European-style palaces and mansions being built meant a change in the scale of photographs. Intimate, card-mounted, autographed portrait photographs that adorned side-tables and reception salons, now gave way to large-scale photographic enlargements on paper and canvas. These large canvases of projected and enlarged photographs were deftly painted with oil colours, and sometimes water colours. Their generous size allowed them prime positions in the Europeanised setting of the new Indian palaces, above fireplaces and mantle pieces, and in high niches in the walls of durbar halls and formal sitting-rooms.
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