Images of Empire
By Paul Richard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday , November 30, 2000
; Page C01
What a wonderful land is India.
In my first hour there I saw a skinny naked man squatting on the curb painting his thigh white, and a bear, his hind paw chained, wallowing with buffalo in a muddy city lot. When I got to the hotel and fell jetlagged into bed, multicolored parakeets--real birds, not dream birds--flew in through the window and whirled above my head. India didn't stop. It didn't stop astonishing, and what was most beguiling was the ceaseless intimation--from the prayer flags and the chants and the mumbling of mantras--that everyone was praying, the Hindus, Jains, Muslims and Sikhs, the farmers and the shepherds, praying all the time.
That land of many visions, smells and temples was surely just as bracing, as brutal and bewildering a century ago, but you wouldn't know it from the photographs shot in the time of the Raj. The trouble with the pictures in "India Through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911" at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is that they ignore the country's spirits--they're blind to India's gods.
These stiff Victorian pictures--with their subtle tones of sepia, their closely observed details, their empty cloudless skies, their tiger shoots and alpine views and turbaned maharajas--are photographs as filters. Whether they were taken by Indians or Britishers doesn't seem to matter. "India Through the Lens" is India through a sieve.
Screened out are her deities (and her teemingness and parakeets, her sexiness and pruderies, the abjectness of her poverty, the bears chained in her mud). The temples have been emptied. The people seem to have no souls.
What these crisp official images--many from the files of the Oriental & India Office of the British Library--venerate instead are the reassuring forms of imperial possession. Modern tourists know that when you switch on the television in any other country, it doesn't really matter where you are, you always get TV. The same holds for these photographs. Despite their Indian subjects they might well have been taken in the German spheres of Africa, or in Dutch Indonesia. This is pure colonial art.
It is earnest, racist, proud and sort of well-intentioned. When the British conquered India they found themselves custodians of temples beyond counting, and they knew that these had value, so they did just what most Victorians would have done under such circumstances: They started making lists.
Though beautiful at times, this isn't really art. It's inventory.
Ports and forts and palaces were carefully recorded. The Raj, at first, used draftsmen, but after 1855 photographers did most of the work. "There are now very few . . . buildings in India--of any importance at least--which have not been photographed with more or less completeness," pronounced a British officer in 1876. Railway stations and harbor facilities were photographed, as was the Taj Mahal (which in these old pictures is still set in leafy orchards instead of jutting abruptly, as it does today, from flat, mown British lawns).
Such sights required documentation. So, too--with what today feels like creepy coldness--did Kipling's "lesser breeds." The less-than-princely Indians met in this exhibit, though many are most handsome, and some are unforgettable, are never individuals. They're ethnographic types.
They are forest folks and hill folk. They are Nagas and Bengalis, Todas and Tibetans and sadhus from Bengal. A "Keliwa Woman of Ta-Keda Tribe, Age about 45 Years" is posed against a grid as if she were a specimen in a moth collection. She isn't named. They're never named. Their skulls were measured with calipers. Casts were taken of their faces. Meanwhile, in America, "Indians" of another sort were being classified as carefully, and for similar reasons. Arranging human beings by racial type was a 19th-century obsession with results.
It isn't just the empty skies seen in these old landscapes that make this art feel blinded. The obtuseness of the conqueror is sensed in every picture here. How much they didn't get.
When it came to India's pieties, they were famously out of it--in part because they mostly found India's gods disgusting.
Even William Wilberforce, that great foe of the slave trade, regarded saving India from her "superstitions" as a cause even more important. His reasoning was clear: "Our religion," he informed the British House of Commons, "is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel."
Such certainties have costs, and this show is dense with certainties. Many paid the price.
The "Indian Mutiny" of 1857, for instance, was triggered when the Raj supplied its high-caste sepoy troops with new Enfield rifles. The weapons came with greased cartridges that were to be bitten open and then rammed down the barrel. The trouble was the grease, which was rumored to be a blend of pig fat and cow fat. To India's cow-revering Hindus and pig-disdaining Muslims the new ammunition could not have been more disgusting had it been smeared with excrement.
Slaughter ensued. You'd think the British would have understood.
The military power that held all India subject is implied in these photographs (the shining bayonets, the ranks of troops), and is everywhere presented as ceremonial and benign. The battle scenes depicted, despite their shell-pocked ruins, have all been cleansed of gore and transformed into monuments to British pluck. The corpses they suggest, the screamings and the massacres and the river's swollen corpses are not shown.
Benign imperial rule has settled on these photographs like a heavy see-through blanket. Pictured in this show is India secure, India in order. These objects have a purpose. This is, or at least was meant to be, reassuring art.
It is unthreatening aesthetically. When the English landscape photographer Samuel Bourne (1834-1912) stood on Kashmir's Meribul Pass his responses to the view were conventionally romantic. "What a puny thing I felt standing on that crest of snow!--a mere atom, and scarcely that in so stupendous a world!" The American Albert Bierstadt dwarfed beneath the Rockies, and the German Casper David Friedrich awestruck in the Alps, gushed in the same tones.
This shouldn't be surprising. The Frenchman Louis Daguerre announced his new invention in 1839, and less than a year later his wonderful technique had arrived in Calcutta, and with it came a sense, largely European and unquestioningly accepted, of what pictures ought to look like. The rigorous conventions of the 19th-century picturesque--that line of distant hills, the winding road that leads the eye deep into the picture's space, its classical proscenium of flanking foreground trees--binds these Indian landscapes to those of other countries.
India is a fluid place. But these aren't fluid pictures. The complicated chemicals of 19th-century photography, their slow response to light, and the clumsiness of heavy, brass-bound wooden cameras hauled about by bullock-carts, or elephants, or camels, instead tends to lend them a sort of leaden stillness. Their tigers are long since shot. Their turbaned maharajas sit as stiff as statues, so sternly are they posed.
Like everything else in "India Through the Lens" they knew their place. There were 565 princely states in the India of the Raj, and though lots of them were tiny all of them had rulers whom the British heaped with honors, and not infrequently despised.
The Rana of Dholpur, wrote Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, to his monarch, Queen Victoria, in 1899, was "a sot." Maharaja Holkore of Indore was "addicted to horrible vices," the Nizam of Hyderabad was "wrapped up in the sloth of the seraglio" and a distressing number of princes had been found to share that "horrible taint . . . best suggested by the name of Oscar Wilde."
Medals were awarded them, and elephants allowed them, and in accordance with their status they got multi-gun salutes. (Some warranted seven guns, some nine, some 21; Queen Victoria, as Empress of India, was granted 101). But all of this was pageantry, little more than pomp, a high art for the British. All the princes at the Sackler look a little bit ridiculous. Despite their pearls and scimitars they've all been somehow stripped.
And so photographs innumerable of Britain's Indian acquisitions--grouped by subject, not by artist--went into the files of the Raj. Vidya Dehejia, the museum's Bombay-born deputy director, looked at many thousands before she picked this show. Despite her knowing eye she says she was unable to detect at a glance whether they were made by natives of the country or by Europeans. Here lies a truth of her exhibit. India is its subject, but it offers Western art.