Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But, there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

—John Berger, Ways of Seeing

During the 18th and 19th centuries, many British landscape artists arrived in India to sketch and paint its imposing forts and richly decorated palaces, temples, pagodas and mosques. They captured the grandeur of the Mughal cities in decline, the new colonial settlements in growth and, of course, the Himalayas with the flow of the Ganga and other rivers from the hills to the oceans and bays. Besides these topographical views, the appearance, attires, culture and customs of the diverse people of India were fascinating subjects to paint and share with Europeans back home, filling in their curiosity of this far-off land. The fabled flora and fauna continued to be painted till much later, taken up as a popular subject by the Englishwomen arriving in India by the late 19th century. Pioneer landscape artists like William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, Charles D’Oyly, William Simpson and James Baillie Fraser travelled across India exploring and sketching remote regions. Their work created a sensation in Europe, being much in demand between the years 1770–1880. This pushed the emergence of new picture printing techniques towards mass production, beginning with Prague based Alois Senefelder’s innovation in lithography in 1796. The original paintings were multiplied as engravings and lithography prints for sale in the European markets and, over the years, numerous “illustrated travelogues of India”, which included these engravings and lithographic pictures, were published, becoming extremely popular.

In 1768, the English artist and writer William Gilpin in his book Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscapes defined the term “picturesque” in so many words:

Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque, between those which please the eye in their natural state; and those which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated in painting.

The landscape artists who travelled across India focused exclusively on the picturesque. They even used a pre-photography gadget, the camera obscura, as a tool to edit, alter proportions and facilitate capturing the picturesque. The accompanying text and travel narratives to these picturesque paintings, published as books, further created an enigma of an Oriental wonderland.

With the invention of the camera, early photographers of India from the 1850s, such as Robert Gill, Felice Beato, R.B. Oakley, Linnaeus Tripe, Captains T. Biggs and E.D. Lyon, to the prominent photographers of the 1890s, such as John Burke, Lala Deen Dayal, Samuel Bourne, Charles Shepherd, Johnston and Hoffmann and T.A. Rust, began replacing the landscape artists, but their emphasis continued to be on the picturesque. Felice Beato, who had reached Lucknow and Kanpur just after the 1857 War of Independence, even stage-managed his war photographs using actors to create photos with the right aesthetics, not too different from the way many photographers use the Photoshop software today.

Often financed by the East India Company, the early European photographers in India replaced not just the landscape and the portrait artists (Company School) but extended their role to support colonial designs through documentation and propaganda. Many of them were English army officers and surgeons living in India. The picture postcard started recording everything from 1910 onwards, not just the picturesque. The photographers took up ethnographic studies of the local population, capturing their everyday life, their religion and mythology. Famous personalities were photographed and photographic cataloguing of Indian antiquities was undertaken. The photographers travelled with the British Army, photographing the wars and the cantonment life with its club and sports facilities. They reported the news, were involved in land surveys and photographed the development of the railway network and other new technology or infrastructure and urban planning efforts undertaken in the large cities. Postcards featured the newly built town halls, high courts, universities, clubs, boulevards and gardens.

Images of the old modes of transport were one of the favourite subjects on early picture postcards, sent home by Europeans living in India. Horse-driven carriages (ticca garhi), tongas, recklas, bullock carts, palanquins, camel and elephant rides continued as the favoured modes of personal transport for both Indians and Europeans.

Today, anyone working on the social history of that time can find an ocean of information in these picture postcards. There are even picture postcards about postcards, post offices and their processes, of stamps, coins and flags of that time. Often, postcards were used as a medium of commercial advertising, or as invitation for events or by shops and establishments to reach out to customers.

The colonial perspective comes out most clearly in the ethnographic subjects of the picture postcards which documented, at times mockingly, the “types of native people” of India and their “jobs or occupations”. Coupled with books like Behind my Bungalow and Inside the Katchery, the lavish lifestyle of the colonial European with an army of servants became a popular subject of picture postcards sent back home by the Europeans.

Many years later, the granddaughter of Babu Jagjivan Ram, a Dalit leader and freedom fighter of India, came across such postcards being sold on the streets of London, when she relocated there for her studies. Devangana Kumar, who grew up in elite Delhi bungalows as a politician’s daughter, was so taken aback by the social inequalities of colonial India that she brought some of these picture postcards to India and created an exhibition showcasing them in 2012. Today, these picture postcards are an important reminder of India’s past and not mere nostalgia of a time gone by.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Picturesque India: A Journey In Early Picture Postcards (1896–1947), Sangeeta and Ratnesh Mathur, Niyogi Books, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.