ABSTRACT
Photography arrived in India quickly after the daguerreotype process had been invented and made public in 1839. Thacker, Spink and Co. in Calcutta advertised imported cameras in the paper Friends of India already in 1840 and the first known lithograph based on a daguerreotype in India appeared the same year, portraying the “Sans Souci” theater in the city (Pinney, 1997: 17; Khan, 2002: 14; Thomas, 1979: 216). The first commercial photographic studio began operating in Calcutta by the end of the 1840s and photographic societies were established during the 1850s in Bombay (1854), Calcutta (1856), and Madras (1856) to disseminate photographic knowledge through meetings and annual exhibitions (Allana, 2014: 34; Thomas, 1979: 218). It remains uncertain when photography was introduced in the province of Punjab but some of the first images with the photographer identified was taken by John McCosh, a British surgeon in the East Indian Company who was stationed at Ferozepur. During the second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–1849) he prepared calotypes depicting Sikhs and places in Lahore and also created a portrait of the 10-year old Maharaja Dalip Singh in profile (Bance, 2009:22, 175; Khan, 2002: 14; Kumar, 2012; McKenzie, 1987; Patel, 1999: 194). Although there were early European and Indian enthusiasts for the new technology, photography during the mid-nineteenth century involved experimenting with bulky cameras and chemicals that were not accessible to all. In Punjab the practice initially relied heavily on travelling government officers in the British civil and military services as well as visiting European photographers in search of the picturesque who captured the landscape, buildings and people from colonial imagination. Another early photographer to represent the Sikhs in images was the Italian Felice Beato who traveled through northern India to document the aftermath of the Mutiny in 1857. His catalogue from the 1850s includes, for instance, images of Sikh soldiers, Nihangs, British and Sikh officers in the Hodson’s Horse Regiment as well as different views of the Golden Temple in Amritsar (Patel, 1999, 196–198; The Last Empire, 1976: 13). Among the photographers that followed especially the Golden temple was eternalized through the lens whether the purpose was to record historical buildings, sell images for the commercial market, or preserve visual tourist souvenirs (see Table 3.1; Madra, Singh and Singh, 2011). Some photographs of the Golden Temple in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (year and photographer/company) 1856, Charles Waterloo Hutchinson 1858–1860, Felice Beato 1865, Samuel Bourne 1860s, John Edward Saché 1863–1864, Samuel Bourne 1864–1866, William Baker 1868–1870, James Craddock 1870, Captain W. G. Stretton 1872, Baker & Burke 1880s, Bourne & Shepherd 1890, Bourne & Shepherd 1900, General A. Skeen 1906, Hannah P. Adams 1906, Herbert G. Ponting 1908, Underwood & Underwood 1908, Stereo Travel Co. 1910, Colonel H. Templar
