A picture is worth a thousand words.” We’ve heard that adage often enough, but in Pramod Kumar KG’s book, Posing for Posterity, a collection of portraits of Indian royalty dating back from the time photography came to India, until Independence the phrase acquires a whole other meaning.
For the beautiful images of the royal families of India reveal not just the glamour of these houses, the social mores and conventions of the time, and an arresting view of these personalities, but also, narrate another story that of the rise and evolution of photography in India. What’s on display, you’ll realise as you look through these pictures, is the transition that the royal way of life, and the art and science of photography, were simultaneously through.
“In the early days, the photographer would have to shoot outside with certain props to ensure that there was adequate lighting,” explains Pramod, of these dual narratives in his book. “As the technology improved, they could shoot indoors, inside spaces, take more intimate photographs. That allowed for a little less formality so from portraits that were posed for outside, in the morning when the sunlight was good, soon you saw photos being taken inside palace courtyards and rooms, durbar halls and so on. The direct consequence of photography changing, was the kind of photographs changing.”
From portraits that depicted a ruler as a “faraway figure, photographed in splendid isolation”, the imagery slowly changed, and towards the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the royals were being depicted with more and more people around them court officials, the women of the family etc. Posing for Posterity has over 200 of these images, carefully sourced and selected by Pramod. You’ll see the Maharani Sinity Devi of Cooch Behar from a portrait shot in 1902, looking almost Anglican in her garb. Then there is the little princess Sultan Jehan of Bhopal, smiling impishly at the cameras in a picture dated 1862.
In selecting the photos for the book, Pramod says he had several criteria, “One was the historicity of the personalities captured in the portraits. If they were very important personalities in princely/ royal India who had been captured by photographers, then I was very keen to have the best representation of them,” he says. The second criterion was the emergence and change in technology each photo was taken at a different time, using a different camera, paper and technology, Pramod points out.
Yet another question that absorbed Pramod was the aesthetics how did these people want to be seen? “That was very crucial,” he says. “The men wanted to be seen in a certain way, the women wanted to be seen in a certain way. Children were posed in a certain way, depending on the conventions and modes prevalent at the time.”
Then there was the need to represent the major photographic studios that existed in (princely or British) India at the time, the remarkable individual photographers, either foreigners or homegrown, who were experimenting with the craft. Overarching it all was the quality of the images themselves, Pramod found that he couldn’t include what might be the first-ever royal portrait shot in India (a young Dalip Singh, photographed by John McCosh in the 1840s) because it wasn’t of a reproducible quality. “At the end of the day, each of the portraits included in the book had to communicate a compelling story,” Pramod says.
And they do. That’s not very surprising considering the extensive research that Pramod put into Posing for Posterity. “(In the course of my research) I realised that the history of photography in India had only been written from the lens of foreigners, based on archives outside the country,” Pramod says. “And that was only half the story. I wanted to show the other half. We could have 20 more books and still not cover all the best photographs from India.”
