Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  In Phule’s accounts of the daily lives of the very poor, his language was direct, gritty, and even scatological—reflective perhaps of the everyday cussing of the poor kids he took in. “At places one finds a line of a child’s piss,” he wrote of a peasant household in Shetkaryacha Asud, a book whose title translates as “The Cultivator’s Whipcord”:

  At some other place, a patch of white ash where a child’s turd has been cleaned up. Several corners of the house are red and dark from tobacco spit. In one corner sits a large grinder, to be worked by three or four women, in another there is a large pestle and mortar, and near the door, under the broom, all the dirt pushed there after sweeping the floor … on top, a rag which was used to clean a baby’s arse.

  According to Natarajan, Phule was especially concerned not to take on “the snooty linguistic quirks of the Brahmins he was opposing.” Instead, she says, he was “embodying in his writing style what he actually felt about his own people—that what they did was connected to the earth, therefore important, therefore worth celebrating—even in his choice of diction and language.”

  Phule’s writing displayed an acute sensitivity to how the stress and panic of poverty and discrimination corrode the mind. The illiterate man is a mark for exploiters; even when not confused by injustice, he may think he deserves it. In Phule’s view, the inculcation of such helplessness was the goal of the Brahmins. As he followed abolitionist movements in the United States in the years before the American Civil War, Phule began to think of the Brahmins as slave masters, and the caste system as an elaborate and effective strategy of human bondage. He named one of his greatest works, written just after the end of the war, “Slavery in the Civilised British Government Under the Cloak of Brahmanism, Exposed by Jyotirao Govindrao Phule.” Ghulamgiri, or Slavery, as the treatise was known, was dedicated to abolitionists:

  With an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom.

  The book was couched as a work of history, in which Phule imagined an ancient golden age before the Brahmins, or Aryans, arrived to subordinate the original Indians, or Dravidians. The Brahmin usurpers invented religious texts and the caste system to give them control of the land by dividing people who might otherwise have made common cause. To Phule, the Brahmins were similar to the European settlers who left the native Americans with nothing.

  Like Rammohun Roy (22), with his imagined democratic past, Phule was inventing a history for himself and his people in the name of future progress. One aspect of Phule’s alternative history that rings true, even today, is the difficulty less advantaged Indians face in coming together to agitate for education or basic resources such as water.

  In 1873, Phule and Savitribai started the Satyashodhak Samaj, or Truth-Seeking Society, to bring members of various lower castes together in the name of self-improvement. The society gathered, often in their house, to persuade non-Brahmins to educate themselves, to perform their own rituals instead of relying on the priestly caste, and to recognize human equality as a universal value. The society continued long after Phule’s death, as did other aspects of his anti-Brahmin movement, but Phule never became a national figure in his lifetime. Politics then was still local, and would stay so until the foundation of the great pan-Indian movement embodied in the Indian National Congress in 1885, just five years before Phule’s death.

  After his death, he was fast forgotten—in part because of his abiding doubt that India’s upper-caste liberals would magnanimously devote themselves to the uplift of the lower castes. It was a skepticism that didn’t comport with nationalist themes. But in recent decades, with the rise of lower-caste parties in India’s democratic politics, and the promise (and uneven enactment) of government policies to improve the lot of the lower castes, Phule has been revived as the forefather of educational schemes for lower-caste boys and girls, who still struggle to obtain the education that Phule knew was the best way out of their subordination. Yet even those who do have education discover that it’s not always the powerful springboard Phule imagined it to be.

  At Phule and Savitribai’s small house in the old part of Pune, the garden around the museum is appropriately well tended. Yet more significant is the working well in the house’s inner courtyard. It is open to all comers, a practice that the couple began in 1868 in protest against barring the Dalits, said to be impure, from drinking from wells that the upper castes used. Today, as fierce battles are waged between the poor and the powerful over water and other resources, that open well stands as a modest reminder of the wide access to opportunity that Phule was fighting to achieve.

  25

  DEEN DAYAL

  Courtier with a Camera

  1844–1910

  In the 1890s, in some circles of the British, European, and Russian aristocracies, one manly ritual seemed practically obligatory. Whether viscount or grand prince or dauphin, at some point you had to hie to India and slaughter some tigers. So, in 1893, an earnest thirty-year-old Austrian royal, Franz Ferdinand, succumbed to his beast-shooting duty and embarked on the Grand Indian Tiger Slaughter Tour. He ended up killing so gleefully, and shooting so often, that he damaged his ears.

  Hosting Ferdinand for part of the exotic hunting tour was the Sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, among the richest men on the planet and the possessor of some of the world’s finest jewels. It was a decade of famine across India, but the diary entries Ferdinand made during his stay provide a glimpse of the other India, the one that drew in the pleasure seekers of the West.

  Mornings, mustache oiled, Ferdinand and the Indian princes took to the jungles with their rifles. A retinue of servants panted behind them, lugging champagne. At day’s end, the party returned to the nizam’s palace, where a lavish formal meal was laid. Opening his diary in the wake of one such dinner, the Habsburg prince recorded irritation at an orchestra whose “imps” with “screeching clarinets” utterly mangled the Austrian imperial anthem. More to his liking was a towering cake brought forth by the liveried staff. When cut, it erupted in flapping wings, and out came a flock of brightly colored birds.

  Just over twenty years from that evening of spectacle, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, the act that catalyzed the First World War. But in this moment, the world’s elites, Eastern and Western, were in relative harmony, and often united by decadent pastimes. The nizam probably had far more in common with Ferdinand, a duke, and the bon vivants of America’s Gilded Age than he did with the unprivileged of his own realm, only a small percentage of whom spoke Urdu, his native tongue.

  Sepia-tone photos of Ferdinand and the nizam, taken by the nizam’s court photographer, stress the two men’s affinity. That emphasis was surely no accident. The photographer was Deen Dayal, the country’s first master of the camera, possessor of an international reputation of his own.

  Early in his career, Dayal saw his images of the historic monuments and architecture of India (commissioned by the British, and ranging from Buddhist stupas to the Taj Mahal) become a sensation, and a means by which Indian landmarks could be appreciated in the West. Over subsequent decades, Dayal’s carefully arranged portraits would open a window on a second aspect of a splendid, idealized India: the lifestyles of the late-nineteenth-century elite. Though India had at this high point of the Raj become the world’s leading stage for the display of social standing, which often involved shooting, a person’s status wasn’t quite fixed unless the moment itself were shot, ideally by Dayal.

  In that historical idyll, those elites still had control over the images they would display to the world. And like many successful artists before him and since, Dayal became adept at selling his patrons the images of themselves they most wanted to see and share. Dayal’s story might be simply the portrait of an artist as a public relations man, if his artistry weren’t so compelling and historically revealing. What he documented caught a cusp moment before the historical change that wo
uld sweep away the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spark revolutions, deplete the Raj and princely India, and ultimately pave the way to Indian independence. Today, the work of Deen Dayal—what he showed and what he left out—has become one of our best means of accessing the hubristic excess that defined, and helped doom, the class of fin de siècle elites.

  * * *

  Although high society survives on the labors of good courtiers, the skill of self-effacement is so central to the work of pleasing one’s patron that the best courtiers may be forgotten to history. Dayal, though, was a courtier with a camera. He left no diaries or personal papers, but the vast and carefully catalogued photographic archive he built can help us pull him out from behind the tripod and into the frame.

  He was born to a family of Jain jewelers in 1844, in Sardhana, near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, where the rebellion of 1857 began. As a teenager, he would surely have heard of the sepoys who massacred British officers and civilians, and he came of age in a time when the shaken Raj was enforcing what was called “the smack” of firm government. Yet Dayal’s own encounters with British officialdom seem to have been beneficial. While studying civil engineering in a college that educated both Indians and Europeans, he found several British patrons, and some years after graduating he joined a vast Raj project to expand historical knowledge of India.

  Part of governing one’s colonies effectively was acquiring the knowledge of what it was, exactly, over which one ruled. A British effort to document the cultural and architectural heritage of India had been long under way by the time Dayal was hired as a draftsman and head estimator in the public works department of the princely state of Indore. The British knowledge enterprise’s early interests had been in topography, geography, and disease, mainly because of the risks these posed to British soldiers. The advent of photography gave the project a new dimension. Had Dayal become a civil engineer a generation earlier, he might have spent his career sketching roads and buildings, since drawings or paintings were how European colonizers first documented their holdings. But daguerreotype photography, invented in France around 1839, had come to India by 1844, followed soon after by glass-plate technologies—and by 1874, when Dayal took his first official photos, the business of surveying had been transformed.

  The surveyor’s eye is present in Dayal’s use of high and sweeping vantage points, which give the viewer of his photographs a sense of command over a field rendered with clarity and precision. His gifts for composition and for capturing luminosity are clear even from early photographs of the architecture of Indore, and in more propagandistic work, such as shots of British military maneuvers. Most distinctive, though, is his ability to coax an aesthetically satisfying and detailed depth from his photographs through the control of tone, brightness, and shade, qualities he achieved mainly through his plate-processing and printing techniques.

  You can get a glimpse of a personal sensibility separate from technical skill in an 1882 photograph of the fort at Jhansi (see 23, Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi). This time he’s shooting from a low angle, using a skeletal tree, rocks, some local men, and a camel to depict scale and build volume as the eye moves toward the stepped geometry of rampart castellations. The sky-cut silhouette of the distant fort, set back in a rocky, unnourishing landscape, gives the image its desolation. You can imagine Dayal silently questioning his patrons, whose forces had defeated the ruler of this once-vibrant fort only twenty-five years before.

  More standard architectural work would make Dayal’s international name: a commission from a flamboyant Raj official and writer, Lepel Griffin, to document the built heritage of central India. His photographs of temples and palaces, forts and other antiquities (in Gwalior, Khajuraho, Deegh, Orchha, and elsewhere) appeared in a celebrated 1886 monograph, Famous Monuments of Central India. As one historian put it, the ownership of colonies in the nineteenth century was “a form of conspicuous consumption on a national scale.” Rulers competed to have the best, and with Dayal’s work, the British public could properly appraise their assets. They found Dayal’s India beautiful and mysterious, far removed as it was from their own industrialized world. Before long, upper-class Londoners were taking European paintings off the wall and putting up reproductions of Dayal’s work. His images were printed on Christmas cards, cabinet cards, and postcards, and turned into engravings in popular magazines. This success introduced Dayal to multiple means of disseminating his work (something he would become a master of) and galvanized what was already a thriving sideline for him: private portraits of the elite.

  Early on, a senior army officer, Sir Henry Daly, had helped Dayal meet clients, and the photographer had quickly developed enough of a reputation that when the Viceroy of India, Lord Northbrook, and the royal party of the Prince of Wales were visiting Indore, he was the photographer they summoned as a portraitist. He became a master of that form, and soon had so many clients he could start a lavish studio in Mumbai and hire a retinue of photographers to work under him.

  Photography was still in its infancy, and exposures were long and painstaking, especially in the Indian heat. But British and other European visitors, used to condescending to Indians, were impressed by Dayal’s elegant stagings, technique, and attention to detail. He’s almost as good as his Western counterparts, they reported, amazed. He was equally adept at puffing his patrons up, and maintained a minor rivalry with a fellow patron-flatterer, the painter Raja Ravi Varma, who served the Maharaja of Travancore.

  Today’s critics seeking something distinctly Indian in Dayal’s work have come up with little. He was in the international photographic mainstream of his time, moving from Indore to serve bigger patrons. Dayal was the official photographer for several viceroys, shooting their architecture, interiors, and guests. Then, in 1894, he was put on a monthly retainer by the nizam, the richest man in India. The nizam’s patronage gave him the means to refine, experiment, and order special lenses from Germany—not to mention command a cavalry of two thousand horsemen under his own personal pennant.

  Princely states such as Hyderabad—big, wealthy, and with a reliably obsequious and pomp-loving nizam—offered the British an essential buttress to their own newly invented imperial order of titles, ceremonies, and ornaments. There was also no Indian nationalism at this point to take on the excess and indolence of the princes. So, for now, as Rudyard Kipling put it, God seemed to have created maharajas to give mankind a spectacle of jewels and marble palaces.

  * * *

  Newspaper reports about Dayal from 1894 describe the moment he won over the nizam, after several years of working for the ruler intermittently. One night, very late, Dayal received a summons: the nizam needed him urgently, for he had just had a spectacular night killing tigers. This, in the nizam’s judgment, was something the world needed to know. Dayal rushed out to the jungle. The resulting shots of the nizam and his tigers won the nizam’s deepest admiration and secured Dayal a job for the rest of his life. “So pleased was his Highness with the results of Mr. Lala Deen’s artistry,” the Deccan Budget of July 6, 1894, reported, “that before leaving camp he himself proposed a title for his photographer … and graced the title with a very pretty and flattering couplet in Urdu recited before the assembled gentlemen in camp.”

  Not long ago, the art historian Deborah Hutton, of the College of New Jersey, was studying the photos from that crucial jungle escapade for a Deen Dayal exhibition she was curating. Something about the photos struck her as off. A little investigation and expert consultation revealed that faint marks on the two dead tigers were sutures. The tigers the nizam had posed with weren’t fresh kills, after all. They were stuffed and pulled off the shelf, as it were, for the photo shoot. So the story of Dayal’s career-making race to the jungle seems to have as much image burnishing in it as the photos of the nizam with his bounty.

  Still, the tiger story reveals the undergirding purpose of portrait photography in that age: less to document reality than to help create compelling and formidable images. The title the nizam gave Dayal
translates as “Bold Warrior of Photography.” The war he was fighting, for the nizam and in his private studio, was for the continuation of the halcyon era of the elites, or at least the continuation of the image of a halcyon era, at a time when aristocratic classes were less and less integral to the functioning of modernizing societies.

  From the 1880s on, mass production, standardization, and steel were creating a frantic geopolitical competition in which states tried to match one another in manufacturing and arms, and traditional power hierarchies were reordered. And the United States, from the Civil War to the turn of the century, industrialized and tripled in economic size, knocking the stuffing out of European agricultural wealth when its western states began to farm. Unified Germany and Meiji Japan were also booming, democratic government became more common, and reigning orders from Britain to St. Petersburg came under further pressure in world affairs.

  Meanwhile, Dayal’s photos, reproduced widely, inspired consumption, not production. They were used to help those who could afford it to compete in the international game of having the biggest, the best, and the most lavish—from parties to hunting expeditions to home decoration. The high resolution of his work made it possible to see, and imitate, the clothes and jewels. Buckingham Palace’s chandelier was huge, so in some acropolitan Gwalior home would be hung one still bigger. It was an international competition in excess that perhaps helped blind its participants to what was happening in a modernizing world and at home.

  In India between 1875 and 1900, famine killed a staggering fifteen million people. The recurring famines in the nizam’s own kingdom would remain out of Dayal’s frame, apart from a telling album of photos taken by artists from his growing crew of studio workers. The album documented the nizam’s famine relief efforts. In many shots, the starving masses have been posed in straight lines or otherwise theatrically arranged. The photos are moving, sometimes haunting, but the purpose of the commission remains clear: to celebrate a benevolent nizam who had a tragedy under control.