ABSTRACT
By the 1860s when equipment was generally available in all of the Western world’s major cities it was also available in Bombay and Calcutta, the two nineteenth-century Indian ports that carried on India’s traditional role as merchant to the world. Clearly, Indian photographers had caught the same fever as others around the world and even used the same equipment. In 1876, Mr. Girish Chandra De, a photographer in Banares, took a photograph of this kind of the Maharaja of Banares with Prince Albert, when Albert visited the subcontinent. When photography came to India, its realistic representation did not supplant old notions; it worked with them. People float in Indian paintings, and many photographic patterns grew out of painters’ longstanding conventions. Unlike Western photographs, nineteenth-century Indian photographs permit people to possess seemingly opposite characteristics, such as rebelliousness and submissiveness.
