Photographing Imperialism, Part Two

Samuel Borne: Kashmirand the Aesthetics ofConquest

In her seminal book, British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch (1857), Harriet Martineau called India
our great Asiatic dependency and described the Himalayas as a steep slope like a diversified wall
with embrasures, covering an area of from 90 to 120 miles in breadth, and running a line of 1,500
miles. From a time beyond record the ridge of this slope has been called by the people who live
below it is the Abode of Cold or of SnowHimlaya. She continued to explain the meaning of the
motion range to the British people, ..we need not scruple to mount the Abode of Coldto the very
palace of the old divinityand use his standpoint, and borrow his eyes, for our survey of our own
dominions lying below. This is an elegant statement of Empire, clearly linking the divine right to rule
borrowed by the English people from god with exploration which was in turn coupled to imperialism.
Indeed, understanding the journeys of Samuel Bourne into the Himalayas it is necessary to
understand The Great Game. The Himalayas are a long and majestic mountain range that runs the
entire border of northern India. Most of the Himalayas lie along the border of China and India, but
Bournes destination was a small portion of the mountains, a territory contingent to British controlled
India, the independent (as of 1846) kingdom of Kashmir. Kashmir, lying north and just outside of
direct British interests was interesting the the Empire because this part of the range erected a
formidable barrier to invasion from Russia and was cut by trade routes that were vital to the
interests of trade and commerce.

For the second half of the nineteenth century, the Empires of England and Russia fought a long and
silent cold war,struggling for control of the various stan territoriesAfghanistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistanthat stood between them both. An examination of the modern
maps, with all these territories clearly spelled out also explains the Crimean War (1853-1856) in
which England and France joined forces with Turkey against Russia in order to prevent the Eastern
Empire from threatening the Ottoman Empire along the Danube River. Russia was also threatening
the British hold on India along the northern borders, thwarted only by the mountains and the buffer
zone of territories such as Afghanistan, which both Empires attempted to control, a task that has
historically proven to be impossible. In point of fact, the first English photographer to explore the
Himalayas was James Burke who entered into the contested zone during the First Afghan War and
the First and Second Sikh Wars, early skirmishes in the Great Game. In his 2002 book,From Kashmir
to Kabul: The Photographs of Burke and Baker, 1860-1900,Omar Kahn referred to the colonial
imaginations conquest of Kashmir. What Kahn was describing was an emotional investment on the
part of the British in what was essentially a fantasy that would be created by an English eye that
sought both the familiarforests, lakes, and villageswhile also glorying in the majesty of mist-veiled
peaks that ascended into the clouds while below two conquering giants engaged in feints towards
one another in the valleys below.

The Great Game was a chess match between two burgeoning Empires, a game, which given the
difficult territory, was a contest neither could win. For the British, Kashmir was a mysterious region
at the edges of its official borders, a land of legend and myth. Today, Kashmir, a largely Muslim
territory is described as Indian-controlled, a euphemism that elides the fact that Kashmir is divided
between Pakistan and India and that the Indian part of Kashmir has been engaged in a decades long
and bloody struggle to separate itself from the clutches of the massive continent. In the 1860s,

politically, Kashmir was a buffer zone, in a time of imperialism, the Himalayas were places to be
explored and conquered, mapped and tamed by the ever expanding British interests. When Bourne
photographed the Memorial for the fallen at Cawnpore, the framing of the architectural homage to
the fallen was an obligatory stop for any photographer of Empire, but his eyes were set on places
less conquered and claimed by his predecessors. Like other photographers in India, Bourne was a
professional, making all the steps and stops expected by the home audience identifying itself with
the conquests of the British Empire, while seeking new scenes not so familiar. In his three
excursions into Kashmir, from 1863-1869, Bourne left behind the urban areas of India and the
culture he held in a certain amount of contempt and entered the realm of the sublime. In November
of 1862 he wrote,
What a mighty unbarring of mountains! it was impossible to gaze on this tumultuous sea of
mountains with being deeply affected with their terrible majesty and awful grandeur, without an
elevation of the Sous capacities, and without a silent uplifting of the heart to Him who formed such
stupendous works, whose eye alone has scanned the red depths of their sunless recesses, and whose
presence only has rested on their mysterious and sublime elevations; and it must be to the credit of
Photography that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these, and
renders itmore susceptible of their sweet and elevating impression.

Wooded Valley from Fulaldarn with the Srikanta Peaks in the Distance(1860s)
The Kashmir beckoned Bourne, attracted by its relative inaccessibility and remoteness and the
legends that still cling to the very name itself. The Himalayas must have seemed to Bourne to be
amenable to the categories of British landscape painting, especially the sublime. Just as in the
American West, the colonizing mindset would have framed the aesthetics of photographing the
unknown in a way to make the strangeness seem both novel and familiar at the same time. In other
words, during his three treks into the Himalayas, Bourne familiarized himself and his audience with
the magnificant scenery of Kashmir while, asSandeep Banerjeepointed out in his 2014 article Not
Altogether Unpicturesque: Samuel Bourne and the Landscaping of the Victorian Himalaya, the
photographer tamed the sublime into the picturesque. But Bournes description of his own work,
evokes his personal feelings of awe and wonder, evoking poetics,What a mighty up bearing of
mountains! What an endless vista go gigantic ranges and valleys, untold and unknown! Peak rose
above peak, summit above summit, range above and beyond range, innumerable and boundless,
until the mind refused to follow the eye in its attempt to comprehend the whole in one grand
conception.

Samuel Bourne.Poplar Avenue. Srinagar. Kashmir (1864)

But Bourne also described his mission in India was to

search for the Indian picturesque. He made three trips in
to the Himalayan ranges, substituting what were
Photographic Expeditions for imperial explorations.
Hefirst explored the Simla Hills and Sutlej valley in
1863, returning with one hundred forty seven
photographs, and then he scouted the Kangra Valley and
Kashmir in 1864, ending his time in Kashmir with asix
month expedition to Kulu, Lahoul and Spiti in 1866,
where he photographed the Gangotri Glacier, the source
of the Ganges. The result was thousand of photographs
andfour series of letters he wrote for theBritish Journal
of Photography, letters which were not published in their
entireity until 1870. Bourne was very fortunate, according to all accounts, to have gone into
partnership with Charles Shepherd, his co-photographer and printer. The result of their Calcutta
business, Bourne & Shepherd, were beautifully developed exquisitely rendered flawlessly executed
images made from wet plates. These photographs were seamless film capable of displaying extreme
detail with a quality that made him the most successful photographer of Indian scenes and allowed
him to expand his business to Bombay and Simla.

Samuel Bourne.View in Narkunda Forest, Chini Valley, Himalayas (1864)

Writing for the Getty Museum, Sarah McDonalds article Man of His Time, described as epitomizing
all the clichs of the Victorian gentleman abroad: a conceit of his British standing; a bullying, colonial
attitude towards the natives, traveling with a ridiculous quantity of extraneous luggage including ad
hoc pieces of furniture, and an almost lunatic persistence in pursuit of his hazardous expeditions.The
quest into Kashmir for Bourne mirrored the next phase of exploration and discovery on the part of
the ever-confident Britain. Now that relative calm had been imposed on the realm, such ventures
now fell into the realm of extreme sport. Women were able to participate in such adventures but the
individual conquest of exotic locales were mainly a male enterprise that, in the minds of imperialists,
was linked to pig-sticking and polo, quintessentially masculine pastimes. Exploring the far off
mountain ranges involved the Englishman in the role of conquerer and leader, employing scores of
servantsBourne employed forty some on his first journey (and they quit his service and abandoned
him in dangerous circumstances)and gave him the sense of being an individual ruler of his own
enterprise.

Samuel Bourne.Gangotri Glacier and

the Bhagirathi Peaks (1866)
AsPramod K. Nayar, the great postcolonialist scholar of theUniversity of
Hyderabad, pointed out inEnglish
Writing and India, 16001920:
Colonizing Aesthetics (2007),
exploration was linked to hunting and
domination and to masculinity and
Bourne would have been transporting
his heavy cameras and multiple glass
plates in a fairly domesticated
adventure. Writing in what Naya
described as a discourse of colonial
conquest, Bourne complained that
even his large size cameras could not encompass the scope and expanse of the Himalayas. Naya
continued in his explanation of the meaning of concepts, suchas an aesthetic mode.
It is in this context of a disappearing exotic, excessive tourism, the sense of vulnerability and the
desire to react colonial control (after 1857) that the picturesque is revived in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. The search forpicturesque scenes in an era of greater imperial control, mapped
terrain and improved transport facilities scaled for and resulted in a new version of the
aesthetic..Danger is as integral to the luxuriant as the passive to the beautiful. What the English
traveller seeks is an escape form a routine of everyday life and therefore embarks on a quest for
difficulty.
And Bournes explorations were as extreme as his ego, but he earned his reputation as being a
peerless and fearless photographer. In addition to carrying a food supply of live sheep and goats and
a portable darkroom tent, he photographed at a record height of almost 19,000 feet where he
achieved the promise of photography, its marvelous truth and power and its ability to record and
render, all in the spirit of colonialpower. The military-like marches by Bourne could not have been
carried out without his scores of Indian subalterns, who rarely if ever were depicted in his scenes of
photographic conquest, termed by Nigel Leask as imperial picturesque in his 2004 book Curiosity
and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840.The Kashmir of Samuel Bourne is orientalized in the
sense that the region is fashioned into The Other or the alien yet familiarized but wild Indian version
of the Highlands and the Lake Country. The mere use of the words, picturesqueand sublime in the
context of colonial and imperial describe the enterprise of Empire in India which used an imperial
discourse, both text and image based, which settled upon the continent like a heavy hand. The
British armchair traveller was given the illusion of power and containment over India, even in its
most dangerous and remote regions, and these adventurous wanderings of the photographer proved
that these distant lands of English desire could be owned and set in place as the jewel in the crown
in the regalia of Queen Victoria.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette andArt History Unstuffed. Thank you.
[emailprotected]

http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/photographing-imperialism/