Time exposure
Duncan Fallowell
The Last Empire: Photography in British India 1855-1911 selected by Clark Worswick, with a commentary by Ains lee Embree (Gordon Fraser £9.95) And what have we got to show for it ? The gin and tonic, of course, springs immediately to hand. Without it our middle folk could never have produced sufficient inner phlegm to have survived the downfall of the spat. It is most chastening to consider what degree of slump we should presently be in, had sherry gone unchallenged in the lubrication of bond-making rituals: very sour grapes, halitosis into the bargain, not to mention an unbalanced relationship with Spain. Women would never have had the stamina to take up smoking.
After the gin and tonic comes yoga. Infusion of the first quite often leads to attempts to grapple with the second by standing on the head or relapse into the supine thunderbolt. Britain actually contains the greatest number of yoga wallahs outside the subcontinent herself. You may not do it, but if you think it nothing more than a lot of heathen pocus, then obviously you need it— there are evening classes all around you, if only you have eyes.
By comparison with these two phenomena, the others seem scarcely more than ornamental: polo, jodhpurs, dungarees, pyjamas, the immigration business, the Koh-i-Noor, the verandah, the bungalow, the collection of Indian miniatures at the V & A. And a surprising number of English who can proclaim, as Mountbatten does in his introduction to this fabulous book, 'India is written across my heart,' a larger heart than Mary Tudor's perforce.
The 150 or so plates collected here, dating from just before the Indian Mutiny in 1857 to the coronation of the King-Emperor in 1911, almost do what it is impossible to do when people ask, 'What's India like?' and one can only jitter and say, 'Big. . .' Evaporating off these photographs is a real whiff of that singular vapour which catches all visitors under the skin, so long as they are able to survive the initial culture shock. Someone once called it, 'the spirit of the Horrible, mingled with the Sublime.' There is no knowing the dismay and rapture it has caused in the breast of many an otherwise stalwart Englishman. In the circumstances it is an odd thing that the proliferation of curry houses throughout the United Kingdom has not been paralleled by the more discreet institution of the opium den, particularly in those spots along the south coast to which so many retired after service in India, because opium alone has the characteristic of recreating this remarkable condition, a monstrous significance just beyond the fingertips.
What's India like? Now, a hundred years on from these pictures, only the upholstery has changed somewhat. 'When the Maharaja of Gwalior decided to decorate his palace with a chandelier greater than any in Buckingham Palace, he was told the ceiling would not support the weight. He hoisted his largest elephant to prove the roof would hold.' And here it is, photographed in 1895. Today the maharajas have lost their purse but Mrs Oberoi builds a collection of futuristic split-level pavilions to rival Delhi Airport, and at dinner the compress of emeralds round her neck makes a cracking sound whenever she attempts to swallow food. The Indian people worship their millionaires, as they do anyone eminent in his field.
A badminton party at Rawalpindi, photographed in the 1890s—everyone standing absolutely still like figures in a Seurat painting. Action photography was not yet possible and this feeling that everyone is waiting for Godot outside time reinforces the essential curiosity of the subject matter. The troops drawn up to welcome George V at the Gateway of India, 1911: it is a history away but of the same order of reality as I encountered in 1975. Every picture is alive with familiar echoes and angles of a living occult world. Not one of them is less than uncanny and most of them are weird to an awesome degree. This doesn't in any way depend on a personal knowledge of the country. I have shown the book to stable middle-aged men and women who would never dream of going beyond Bournemouth, and seen their features dissolve into an
expression of wonder and perplexity, possi' bly for the first time since childhood. What,, does it mean ? What has happened to us More than nostalgia—here are the finger' prints of spirits more potent than either Indians or English.
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