Framing Portraits, Binding Albums is like peering into unknown universes through photographs and vivid written accounts. These twenty-one photo essays grew out of a roundtable headed by the Family Camera Network held at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2019. Photographs, especially family photographs, have not been widely studied in India in terms of using them to understand communities, rituals, hierarchies and relationships. They have been regarded more as adjuncts to written documents, notwithstanding the seminal works of Malavika Karlekar and Tapati Guha Thakurta on the subject. The present volume’s aim is to redress that lacuna.
Intrinsic to the reading of photographs is the unpacking of what the editors Shilpi Goswami and Suryanandini Narain refer to in the Introduction as ‘codes’. ‘What role does photography play in encoding the ideal family; what are these codes and in what ways are cracks visible?’ This question becomes more relevant given that photography itself changed after the coming of the Brownie camera and all the models that followed. Earlier, taking a photograph indicated a special occasion—marriage, graduation, formal extended family groups—and were taken at studios with their established tropes of seating, backdrops and dressing up. Once individuals possessed cameras, photos began to express individual aspirations, which also had their established ‘codes’ but with many more variations.
This is seen clearly in one of the most interesting essays: Suryanandini Narain’s ‘Yatra Chitra/Parivar Chitra: Mrs Gupta’s Photographic Record of a Family amidst a Changing Nation’. Mrs Gupta lived in Brindavan with her husband, the Principal of a local college, and their three children—Guddu, Guddi and Dabloo. Her photo albums of her family’s holidays in the 1960s to historical places of interest show the historic/tourist sites plus the whole family, which, according to Narain, ‘frame Mrs Gupta’s aspirations of looking at the family and nation as part of the same continued trajectory…’. The photos and Mrs Gupta’s diary are wonderfully evocative of the 1960s when travels within India were still adventurous excursions to alien worlds. On a trip to the South, for instance, the Gupta family sought Marwari bhojanalayas as a respite from the then unfamiliar south Indian food—unlike today where dosas are as much part of a north Indian menu as aloo parathas.
The trajectory of a community can also be tracked through the photographs they keep. Adira Thekkuveetil’s exploration of the archive of the Anglo-Indian community tracks it from its nascent beginnings in the late eighteenth century to its becoming identified with the Railways, Post and Telegraph services and running dedicated schools and clubs. One of the interesting points raised here is that of stereotypes. In a footnote Thekkuveetil describes how she had selected a lot of photos of musicians or of club dances until the eminent Anglo-Indian author Allan Sealy, whom she consulted, pointed out that it upfronted a ‘fun-loving’, therefore ‘loose’ stereotype. Today, Anglo-Indians are mostly dispersed in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the photographs became less about individual stories and more of a historical or sociological archive. They are representative of the whole community rather than that specific context, person and time.
The Bengali community in Delhi still has an evolving profile. In ‘Between Silences and Erasure: The Absence of a Family Archive’, Shilpi Goswami describes how the Bengalis arrived in Delhi, many via Agra, in the 1850s, first settling in places like Sitaram Bazar, then moving to Paharganj, Karol Bagh, Timarpur and Mukherjee Nagar; post 1947 to south Delhi as it developed, often to the new mid-level government colonies—Nauroji Nagar and Sarojini Nagar, for instance. Goswami explores the photos of her paternal and maternal grandparents to put together the stories about how this amorphous diaspora slowly segued into a community—setting up Puja committees—the first puja was in Kashmere Gate in 1910—and Bengali schools. Many who arrived after 1947 were refugees from East Bengal and had lost their belongings including photos. It is this absence of tactile memories which is defining in many ways.
The Partition also figures in Aditi Nath’s powerful essay, ‘Photographing Trauma, Repatriation and New Life: Remembering the Family during the Partition of 1947’ which tells the story of Ved Kumari who became Fatima Bibi after she was separated from her family, married a man from Mirpur (now in PoK) and converted to Islam. She was then 14. Three children were born of this marriage. When the Repatriation Act of 1950 came into effect, sending women back to their original families, Fatima didn’t want to be parted from her children—and presumably her husband—so she went into hiding and her husband soon took the whole family, and emigrated to Birmingham. Later from the UK, Fatima even managed to contact her brothers in Jammu, and eventually managed to meet them. The photos were collected by Zulfikar Ali, her eldest son or stepson—I couldn’t quite make out—who seems devoted to her and has shared her photos with the archive. There’s one of her in Birmingham with two of her children, and all appear happy and contented. Another shows her proudly wearing an elaborately embroidered cardigan over salwar kameez, carrying a smart handbag with the tips of her pointed polished shoes peeping out from beneath her salwar. Possibly this was sent to her brothers to reassure them that she was safe in her new life. The photos convey the happy ending to this story—most such stories didn’t end well.
Uzma Mohsin’s ‘Snapshot of a Modernist Muslim Imagination’ tracks Aligarh Muslim University’s history. It was established by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan with the aim of giving Muslim boys modern western education which he felt was needed for the community to progress. Originally only for men, subsequently women were also included though initially they studied separately, and girls observed purdah. Post Independence, the classes were held jointly but the girls sat behind a screen, even though they bicycled to college. One day the girls decided to dispense with the screen and although their male classmates warned them that the teacher might reprimand them, they persisted, and the teacher when he arrived accepted their argument and the screen was dispensed with. One of the girls was Sayera Habib—and there’s a photo of her with a bicycle in the Aligarh archive, which records this tryst with modernity.
Another encounter with modernity is evident in Jayanti and Diya Dutta’s recollection of their mother’s girlhood in sixties’ Calcutta (‘Memories of My Mother’s Early Travels and Family Life’). Her first journey out of Calcutta was at the age of 15 and travelling with her cousins on the then newly minted Rajdhani Express. To hear the chair being called very comfortable and the food elegantly served is indeed startling. The photos of her mother later, wearing sunglasses, driving, short haired, convey the modernity the Bengali middle class was embracing in the 1960s. There is a photograph of her honeymoon in Darjeeling taken in a photo studio with the happy couple posing in front of the mandatory painted backdrop of the Taj Mahal.
All in all, this is a wonderful collection—a true slice of life, rich with granular detail and many thought-provoking insights.
Ranjana Sengupta is former Deputy Publisher, Penguin Random House India, where she commissioned non-fiction in the areas of politics, history, culture, and biography. She was a journalist for the first 15 years of her career, working in the Hindustan Times, Indian Express, and Sunday. Currently, she is Consulting Editor, A Suitable Agency.