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A hundred and fifty years after photographer James Waterhouse charmed Nawab Sikander Begum of Bhopal to sit for him, an illustrated tome on the encounter, and other Indian trysts, enthralls Gargi Gupta.
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The encounter gains added significance because later in his career, Waterhouse gains fame as a major innovator in the area of photo-optics and photo-chemistry. In his essay, “James Waterhouse: His career in process printing”, photographic historian Michael Gray charts Waterhouse’s application — as head of the Survey of India’s Photographic and Lithographic Office — of the then newly-emerging photo-reprographic technologies to map-making and book illustration, concluding that “his largely neglected technical contributions to the advancement of photomechanical processes have... proved of even greater significance to the history of the medium”.
Presenting the singular career of an early pioneer, The Waterhouse Albums attempts to right an important oversight of modern photographic scholarship. The handsome large format illustrated book includes all the 94 prints in the two albums Waterhouse compiled in London after his retirement, which were acquired by Ebrahim Alkazi for his collection a decade ago. The book also includes contextual essays by John Falconer, curator of photography at the British Library; Rosemary Crill, curator of South Asian art at the Victoria & Albert (on the textile fashion in the photographs); Shahryar M Khan, a descendent of the Bhopal ruling family (on Bhopal’s unique history as a princely state), and the aforementioned Gray.
Appended also are Waterhouse’s own narrative of his photographic sojourns in India, published in 1900-01 in the journal Camera Obscura —interesting not just for their wealth of technical detail, but also for their quotidian insights into life at the time.
The highlight of the book is, of course, Waterhouse’s portraits of Sikander Begum, which are the only visual record of this rather singular character from history. The “first [female] ruler in South Asia to assert the right of legal title”, Khan describes her as “a charismatic, fearsome, Amazonian personality who went tiger-hunting, inspected her troops on parade and ruled with an iron hand” — and one can well imagine all that from Waterhouse’s portraits of her. She was also an ally of the British in the 1857 uprising, “sending supplies of grain and other forage...for the use of the European troops” and “bodies of her own troops to protect some of the towns and districts of Saugor and Bundulcund”, wrote her daughter Shah Jehan who succeeded her as nawab.
The early history of photography in India is inextricably linked to Britain’s colonial ambitions in these parts. It is not for nothing that the camera came to India within a year or two of its being developed in the West, as the colonisers deployed the new technology, to “capture” its peoples, the way they lived, what they wore and ate, their buildings and bazaars, and the unfamiliar topography.
It was a June 1861 official order by Governor General Lord Canning, calling for “photographic likenesses of characteristic specimens of the more remarkable tribes in India”, that was the impetus for Waterhouse and others like him — Clarence Comyn Taylor, (whose photographs of the Nepal royalty are part of the albums), William Baker and John Burke (Kashmir, Afghanistan, 1860-1900), Linaeus Tripe (Burma, 1850s), J C A Dannenberg (Lucknow, late 1850s) — to go out into the wild, their cameras behind them carried by a long train of servants. In its very purpose, then, Waterhouse’s photographs serve the imperialist brief.
Yet, and as the book amply demonstrates, Waterhouse went beyond it, according to those he photographed a human dignity by the simple act of recording their name, age, employment, height, style and colour of dress, and, often, an aspect of their personality — “an amiability, a heartiness” or some other characteristic.
“Ghasseram,” he describes one of his subjects, “calls himself a Rajpoot and dresses as such, but is really a Kayath...he did not much like his photograph taken, and seemed much relieved when he found that he had nothing to pay.”
Another portrait of a man crouching on the floor, identified as Purta, in Sitamau, is captioned: “I could not take him standing on account of his unsteadiness, the result of excessive opium eating: he was perfectly stupid from opium.”
India, as Waterhouse was to discover during his one year traipse round the central provinces, was not an easy place to go photographing. That Waterhouse persevered even so is a measure of his worth as a photographer.[----------]
THE WATERHOUSE ALBUMS
CENTRAL INDIAN PROVINCES
Editor: John Falconer
Publisher: Mapin with The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Pages: 262
Price: Rs 3,250