A broad range of Bombay photographs from the 1840s to 1900 have been collected in a new book by Mumbai-based curator Susan Hapgood.
Published by Mapin, Early Bombay Photography emerged from the Focus Photography Festival in Mumbai in 2013, at which Hapgood displayed vintage images of the city at an exhibition called A Fantastic Legacy.
Her book explores how the new art form flourished in 19th century Mumbai through photography societies and a host of enthusiastic photographers, both European and Indian.
Photo: John Edward Saché
Malabar Hill, c. 1869
Albumen silver print, photographer’s reference 396, 235 x 290 mm
Courtesy of Roland Belgrave Vintage Photography, Brighton.
“Bombay’s unique role as a commercial crossroads, with a direct tie to England, led to its very early embrace of the medium in the 1840s,” said Hapgood, executive director of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York and a trustee of the Mumbai Art Room.
Well before Hapgood moved to Mumbai from the US in 2010, she fell in love with 19th century Indian photography, which she found to be “just as fabulous as more familiar photographs”.
Susan Hapgood. Photo courtesy: Mapin
Photography spread rapidly from Europe to Bombay in the 1850s, Hapgood said. The Photographic Society of Bombay was founded in 1854 – just a year after its counterpart in London – and had enlisted at least 200 members by 1856.
Colin Murray for Bourne & Shepherd
Esplanade Road, c. 1890
Photographic print, photographer’s notation 2214, 210 x 290 mm
Collection of Gopal Nair, Mumbai.
Photographer Unknown
View of the Harbour (from Apollo Bunder), c. 1880s
Albumen silver print, 183 x 235 mm
Collection of Gopal Nair, Mumbai
The Society’s non-European members included Dr Narayan Daji, one of the earliest known Indian photographers who Hapgood describes as the “undersung brother of Dr Bhau Daji”. Dr Bhau Daji, whose name adorns a museum in the Byculla area, was also a member of the Photographic Society. Both brothers were doctors who had studied from Bombay’s Grant Medical College.
“Photography was extremely expensive but it also required extensive knowledge of chemistry and thus many of the earliest photographers were also doctors educated at Grant Medical College,” said Hapgood.
Another photographer Hapgood finds most striking is Hurrichund Chintamon, a commercially successful portraitist who won first prizes for his work twice at the Elphinstone Institution, where he learnt photography in the 1850s. He then set up his own photo studio. His portraits were exhibited not just in Bombay but also at the Paris International Exposition of 1867.
Hurrichund Chintamon
Self-Portrait, 1860
Albumen silver print, 231 x 194 mm
South and Southeast Asian Collections, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“In the earliest days the photographs were quite experimental, showing the immediate environs, trees, archaeological sites, portraiture,” said Hapgood. “Extremely intriguing to me were the ethnographic images that were made right around the time of the uprising of 1857, when photography was put to use as a tool of ‘scientific’ study of Indians, which collided with colonial interests and a very healthy market for exotic imagery in Europe.”
This was evident in the names of some of the series of photographs taken in Bombay during the 1800s. Photographer William Johnson, for instance, exhibited photos in series called "Costumes and characters of Western India" and "Oriental races and tribes, residents and visitors of Bombay".
William Johnson
The Cotton Market, from The Indian Amateur’s Photographic Album, c. 1856–58
Albumen silver print mounted on card with text on verso, 195 x 245 mm
Courtesy of Farooq Issa, Phillips Antiques, Mumbai.
Cover photo of Early Bombay Photography, photo by Shivshanker Narayen
Group of mistress and pupils of the Government Normal School, 1873
Albumen silver print, 182 x 236 mm
British Library, London/© British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4641)
Edward Taurines
A Parsee Girls’ School, Bombay, c. 1880s
Albumen silver print, 180 x 235 mm
Collection of Gopal Nair, Mumbai
A prominent British photographer in Bombay was Captain Thomas Biggs, a member of the artillery, who was appointed as the government photographer in 1855. Both Biggs and his successor Dr William Henry Pigou shot various documentary pictures of temples and mosques for the Asiatic Society.
At one point, Biggs expressed a sentiment that represented the ignorance and lack of empathy with which many colonial officials operated – he called some of the Hindu scriptures he photographed morally “indecent” and “wrote a letter seeking permission to destroy any of the ‘truly disgusting’ sculpted figures he saw”, Hapgood writes.
Thomas Biggs or William Henry Pigou (attrib.)
Entrance to the large Karlee Cave, c. 1855–1858
Albumen silver print, 206 x 244 mm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XO.735.1.56