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Photographing Imperialism, Part One
Photographing Imperialism, Part One
Photographing Imperialism, Part One
seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have
never been equaled with just and lively representations of human life and human nature, with the
most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade, with full and
correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to
increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready
access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and
hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in
that language is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in
all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by
the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to
become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East.
This casual assumption of superiority as the foundation of Imperialism was briefly challenged by the
Indians in 1857 in what is now termed, in India, as the first war of independence, and what is called
in England as the India Mutiny. The doctrine of Macauley had only intensified over the decades and
the British Empire was aggressively taking over lands and insisting on enveloping India with
dominance not only economically but also politically and culturally. There rebellion was not so much
about the tightening of the Empires grip on the economy but the insistence of Westernization and
the very real threat of having long held religious beliefs wiped out by a small army of wellintentioned missionaries and an ever expanding array of laws intended to break apart the
interlocking elements of a social system governed by the laws of caste. The Mutiny was
characterized by desperate violence on both sides and ended, predictably, with the crushing of the
rebellion by the technologically superior British who, it must be said, did not exhibit high ideals of
civilized behavior during the struggle. The outcome was the abolition of the East India Company and
England began to rule India directly and the continent came firmly under the control of what was
the greatest Empire of the modern era.
It is into this new situation of a brutal and self-serving Empire that photographer Samuel Bourne
(1834-1912) arrived in India in 1863. As the British moved in, with an eye towards colonizing their
imperial prize, photographers inevitably followed, equipped with the cumbersome wet-plate kit and
carrying the imperial eye, the camera with a magisterial gaze. Bourne, who had trained in the
picturesque regions of English Lake country and the Highlands, was an adventurer, one of many
who flocked to India seeking their fortunes in a land now subdued and tamed. Part one of the Indian
adventure was already over and the contest of India was more or less complete in the 1860s. A
decade earlier in 1857, photographer British photographer Felix Beato (1832-1909) had hurried to
India and captured the aftermath of the Mutiny. His stark 1858 image with its angry imperial
title,The Well of Cawnpore Where 2,000 English Were Barbarously Murdered, shows the site on one
of the most horrifying events of the Mutiny, the slaughter of seventy-three women and one hundred
twenty-four children by Indian mutineers. The Well refers to a literal well where the butchered
bodies of the murdered English were dumped. This event was seared into the collective
consciousness of the British and the photographs and prints of the infamous site were used to both
shame and humble the Indians and to justify the necessity for the rule of the civilizing Empire.
[The Well of Cawnpore Where 2,000 English Were Barbarously Murdered]; Felice Beato (English,
born Italy, 1832 1909), Henry Hering (British, 1814 1893); India; 1858 1862; Albumen silver print;
22.2 x 30.3 cm (8 3/4 x 11 15/16 in.); 84.XO.421.50
Image courtesy of Getty Images
Samuel Bourne. Cawnpore: The Memorial Well, with the Cawnpore Church in the Distance (1865)
As Sean Willcock explained in his 2015 article Aesthetic Bodies: Posing on Sites of Violence in India,
18571900,
Such was the grisly tomb that became the focus for an obsessive project ofmemorialisation and
sanctification following its discovery by the horrified British.European aesthetic practices from
picturesque landscape design to sculpture andtouristic photography were mobilised to reframe the
unsettling emblem ofimperial vulnerability.
At the time Beato photographed the Well, the place of terror had not yet been transformed, but
when Bourne recorded the same place, it had been transformed into an impressive memorial. There
is nothing even remotely Indian about the Memorial, designed by Italian artistBaron Carlo
Marochetti, with its English and Christian angel, eyes downcast in heathen lands, and soul uplifted
by the cross. The screen behind the angel is pure Gothic, reflecting the revival currently in vogue in
England, and the inscription around the edge of the Well itself reads, Sacred to the perpetual
memory of a great company of Christian people chiefly women and children, cruelly massacred near
this spot by the rebel Nana Sahib, and thrown, the dying with the dead, into the well beneath, on the
15th of July, 1857.
The story of the Mutiny is a tangled tale of the outright misrule of the British East India company,
the refusal of the British to accept or tolerate non-Christian beliefs in a continent dominated by
Hinduism and Islam faiths, and the careless mindset of the British government that had, up until
that time, allowed a commercial enterprise to operate in the name of empire and commercial
imperialism. The Sepoy troops that mutinied served under the interestingly named Honourable East
India Company and numbering some 370,000 were under Company control, and led by some 34,000
British trained military officers. This untenable situation, remedied when Victoria became not only
Queen but also Empress of India, could not continue after the long and bitter Mutiny was
suppressed.The actual site of the massacre of the women and children, photographed by Bourne,
was, in fact, a compound built by a British officer for his Indian mistress, theBibighar or House of
Women. For decades, British men had been adventuring in India, largely without the civilizing
company of white British women. The largely male society sought to suppress intimations of
homosexuality which inevitable arouse in such a homosocial society. In India, Englishmen learned
the Indian sports of pig sticking and polo, activities that were guaranteed to improve male physique
especially the male buttocks, which would be greatly improved by rigorous riding. To ward off male
to male attractions an antidote was in order, namely local women, whose Indian skin and faith would
render them forever outside the acceptable boundaries of British decorum, a recipe for heartbreak
and tragedy. It was probably on accident that the leader of the Mutiny, Nana Sahib, brought the
British women and children to this place tainted by sexual desire. Bournes image of the memorial
shows the entire siteonce a haremfrom a distance that allows his camera lens to take in the entire
vista which he measures by posing three Indians subjects in the middle ground. Posed in a
harmonious triangle and surrounded by sentry like newly planted trees, the natives are shown as
satisfying suborned and passive, adding a touch of reminder to the now complete British control of
India. The entire park has been wiped clean of the memory of its original function, a place for
mistresses, and has been turned over to official British male rule with Indian males arranged in
satisfyingly humbled positions.
In understanding the impact of the Mutiny and the entry of the official British government into India,
the now official jewel in the crown, one can do no better than Harriet Martineaus(1802 1876)British
Rule in India: A Historical Sketch. Written in 1857 when the Mutiny was still unsettled, this book is
an example of early sociology by a pioneering sociologist who had previously studied the alien land
of America,Society in America(1837). She followed up her commentary on India
withSuggestionsToward theFutureGovernment ofIndia(1858) when the uprising was apparently
under control. Although Martineau was a believer, as were virtually all English people, that England
had a mission to civilize India, she was critical of the lack of tolerance for religious beliefs that led to
the uprising when Muslim troops were subjected to pork fat. It was part of the British mindset that
India needed to be reformed, and Martineau cautioned that this task should not be undertaken in
ignorance and that perhaps the Indians could both rule and improved themselves under British
guidance. In Suggestions, she cautioned,
The commonest remark made in all companies and in all periodicals within the last half-year, has
been that scarcely anybody knows anything about India. Outside of the small Anglo-Indian society
collected inLondon and about the Companys colleges, there is next to no knowledge tat all about the
history , thee geography, or the politics of Hindustan. So says the Times newspaper; and such is the
frank acknowledgment of candid personal whom one meets every day asking for knowledge. The
mutiny has helped some of us to some of the geography of the country; but its history and political
condition are not to be so easily picked up: and it may be confidently said that no honest
constituency in the kinsmen would present to be qualified to decide, through its representatives, on
the best method of dealing with such a dependency as India.
It would be the next generation of photographerssuch as Samuel Borunewho would come to a newly
peaceful and tamed corner of an ever-increasing empire and continue the taming and the framing, if
you will, through photographic narratives of an alien and exotic land of fantasy and fascination and,
of course, continued and willful misunderstandings as fictionalized in E. M. Fosters Passage to India
(1924) and Paul Scotts TheJewel in the Crown.The Raj Quartet(1966) books which were sage
critiques of British rule in India.