HistoriCity | Colonial lens to Republic’s viewfinder: Evolution of photography in India

PHotographs only when demo a variation of the true and objectiveness, what gets in the frame is often as important as what is not. With the death of Raghu Rai, India lost not just a photographer, but a way of remembering itself. More than merely documentation; his photographs serve as an evolving archive of the Republic; its power and pageantry, and ruptures and silences. Ordinary, unrecorded life. That idea of photography as a long, accumulating record--almost a parallel history--sits at the heart of how the medium has evolved across the world, as also in India.Photography a Tool of PowerAs Europe entered the Age of Industrialisation, it was accompanied by a growing impulse to observe, classify, and impose order on the world. This, as Nathaniel Gaskell and Diva Gujral point out in Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present, was an ‘urge’ often framed, patronisingly, as an effort to “bring light” to unfamiliar places. This mindset extended to the cataloguing of peoples, cultures, and natural environments encountered through colonial expansion. The camera proved to be an ideal tool for this project. Racism not only flowed as the gaze of the coloniser and imprinted itself indelibly both in the records of the colonial project as well as in the minds of the Indians who began intellectually crystallising their societies in unprecedented ways.Sudhir Mahadevan elaborates on this further in ‘Archives and Origins: The Material and Vernacular Cultures of Photography in India’. He writes that by the 1990s, “scholars turned their attention to the discursive parameters that, under British rule, regularised photography as a source of knowledge and as an instrument of governance“. Researchers began to examine how photography was institutionalised as both a way of producing knowledge and a tool of governance within the British Empire.Some colonial-era photographs, such as those associated with figures like Maurice Vidal Portman Homfray, did little, for instance, to conceal the paternalistic attitudes underpinning their production. These images often staged or framed their subjects in ways that reinforced a narrative of European authority and benevolence, as Gaskell and Gujral note, casting the colonial figure as a civilising presence among supposedly “primitive” communities. Even where such intent was not explicitly stated, the visual language and accompanying captions frequently reproduced a saviour mentality, positioning the photographer or colonial agent as an enlightened intermediary rather than an embedded participant in a deeply unequal system. Some images such as those of the Madras famine of 1870s have been labelled ‘dehumanising’ today, Willoughby Wallace Hooper was present at Myanmar, Madras and other places arranging dead and dying children, women and men against imperial symbols be they buildings or execution ditches. His works were sold and collected as emaciated and famine-stricken Indians became ‘objects’ in the possession of the empire.Also Read: HistoriCity | Tamil Nadu: A Brief History from Presidency to TamilakamTo view them all uniformly, however, would be reductive; James Waterhouse advanced cartography and astronomical photography, while John Marshall helped shape archaeological photography globally. Marshall’s work, in particular, reflects a depth of engagement that at times exceeded the limits of the colonial framework in which he worked.Photography arrives in IndiaPhotography reached India almost as soon as the invention was announced in Europe. By 1839, it was already being discussed at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and the Bombay Times published a detailed account of the process developed by the French artist and photographer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. It was swiftly adopted by the British to document and classify the communities they governed; first under the East India Company and later under Crown rule in the period following the 1857 rebellion. Even when not overtly intended as imperial propaganda, photography became deeply embedded in and instrumental to the colonial enterprise.The first decades of the camera in India, as pointed out by Gayatri Sinha in her edited volume “Points of View: Defining Moments of Photography in India” saw the emergence of the photo studio. The period also saw the arrival of itinerant photographers from abroad, alongside efforts to visually memorialise the events of 1857. Among the most striking figures was Felice Beato, often regarded as one of the earliest war photographers. Beato approached the medium with a theatrical sensibility, at times staging or reconstructing scenes of violence, using human remains as stark, unsettling props, to produce images that blurred the line between documentation and dramatic re-enactment.Early scholarship by G. Thomas, Ray Desmond, and others, focused on establishing timelines, key dates, and overarching shifts in the medium’s development. These works were largely descriptive, centred on documenting, cataloguing, and recording photography’s early trajectory.Mahadevan points to another rich source of information, “Newspaper advertisements from publications like the Bengal Hurkaru and the Friend of India offer a revealing glimpse into how photography first entered everyday life in colonial India. Import firms such as Thacker, Spink and Company marketed photographic equipment alongside an eclectic mix of European goods--cheese, cutlery, clothing, wine, books, and novelty items--within a growing consumer marketplace catering to colonial residents. In this context, photography initially appeared less as a serious medium and more as a curiosity: a scientific novelty or even a toy.” The availability of cameras with everyday commodities, albeit still expensive, underscores how fluid and undefined photography’s status was in its early years; circulating not yet as an art or discipline, but as part of a broader culture of imported curiosities.New Trends EmergeBy the late nineteenth century, the dominance of the picturesque was giving way to Pictorialism, a style that emphasised the crafted image over mere mechanical capture, and encouraged photographers to see themselves as artists. In India, one of its key practitioners was Shapoor Bhedwar, a Bombay-based photographer, whose soft-focus, carefully staged studio portraits echoed the theatrical sensibilities of British pioneer Henry Peach Robinson. Bhedwar’s membership in the Linked Ring further reflects his engagement with international photographic debates around art and science. By the mid-twentieth century, pictorialism had spread beyond elite practitioners to include amateur photographers across India.At the same time, portrait photography was expanding rapidly. While studios had existed in port cities like Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta since the 1840s, the turn of the century saw growing demand from Indian clients eager to assert status through photographic likeness. Earlier portraits largely served colonial officials, mercantile elites, and royalty: groups who could use dress, pose, and setting to project authority, even within the constraints of colonial rule. Over time, as cameras became more accessible, this practice extended to the urban middle classes and eventually to smaller towns.While studio photography often relied on artifice, the “Views of India” genre positioned itself as a more faithful visual record of the subcontinent’s landscapes and built environment. These images were meticulously composed yet framed as objective, and circulated widely, shaping how India was seen both within and beyond its borders. The field drew a diverse set of practitioners: figures such as John Murray, Abbas Ali (famous for his work in Lucknow), John Edward Sache, William Baker, and John Burke were active in northern India. In Bengal Sukumar Ray, father of Satayajit Ray became a pioneer in photography after returning from England where he trained in photography and lithography. In the south, Linnaeus Tripe documented the Madras Presidency, and Raja Deen Dayal emerged as one of the most accomplished Indian photographers of the period, producing an extensive body of work from Secunderabad and Bombay.Also Read: HistoriCity | The pre-colonial roots of Christianity in IndiaGayatri Sinha locates the early twentieth century as a formative moment in the emergence of photojournalism in India. She argues that the increasing presence of crowd images in newspapers disrupted earlier colonial visual regimes which had framed Indians as static, typologised subjects. In contrast, these new photographic representations captured movement, assembly, and collective presence, offering a more dynamic and politically charged visual language.The eventual arrival of the Kodak Brownie, introduced by Eastman Kodak, marked a decisive shift in making photography accessible to a much wider public. As the company actively courted new users, women emerged as a key target audience, with the camera marketed energetically to them as both a practical device and a tool of leisure, thereby helping to broaden participation in photography beyond its earlier, more exclusive circles.Author Valay Singh’s HistoriCity is a column about a city in the news based on its documented history, mythology, and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.Author Valay Singh’s HistoriCity is a column about a city in the news based on its documented history, mythology, and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.