PHOTOGRAPHY

Images from Tripe

The works of Capt. Linnaeus Tripe, a pioneering photographer of British India, provide early examples of excellence in the art and also a record of life and times in the 19th century.

S. THEODORE BASKARAN

THE Victoria and Albert Museum. The study room of the Prints and Photographs section. The view of a sunny London, framed by a window, left me unmoved as I waited to lay my eyes on some photographs that I had requisitioned, taken by Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902), described by an art historian as "one of the pillars of early Indian photography".

One of the early works by the 'Photographer for the Government'.

Within 10 years of its invention by Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1839, photography was being practised in Madras. In 1855, it was introduced as a subject in the Madras School of Industrial Art (the present College of Arts and Crafts), one of the earliest in Asia to offer the subject. Principal A. Hunter encouraged students to record agricultural practices and indigenous implements in photographs.

The Photographic Society was founded in Chennai in 1856, with Walter Elliot, the man who salvaged the Buddhist panels from Amaravathi, as the first president. The Society held annual exhibitions. Elliot, a civil servant, was a naturalist, and at least one creature, the Madras Tree Shrew (Anathana ellioti ellioti) has been named after him.

Realising the potential of the new art form, the British government had decided to train in photography some of the army officers selected to come to India. Capt. Linnaeus Tripe of 12 Native Infantry, who was in Madras in the 1850s, was one of them. His first major assignment took him to Ava in Burma (now Myanmar) as photographer to the British mission. He stayed there for a few months in 1855 and produced a number of photographs. A collection of these photographs, called 300 Views of Burma and released in Bangalore in 1857, seems to be his first publication.

Following an initiative by Governor-General Lord Canning, the government decided to appoint one official photographer in each Presidency to document monuments and edifices. The idea was to show people back home the kind of land and people being governed. The work of these official photographers documenting the archaeological heritage of the subcontinent proved a crucial factor in Lord Curzon deciding to give legal protection to monuments. When the government scouted for talent, Tripe filled that slot in Madras. With the designation 'Photographer for the Government', he equipped himself with tents and other accessories and got ready to travel.

For four years, from 1856 to 1860, Tripe operated with Madras as his base. He photographed forts and temples in Tiruchi, Thanjavur, Chidambaram, Pudukkottai and Srirangam. With abundant sunlight and limitless subjects, India proved to be a paradise for photograph pioneers like him. With his assistant C. Iyahsawmy he travelled on horseback, pitched tents near monuments and photographed them. He published his works in the form of albums, each comprising 50 to 70 plates, with introductions by scholars such as G.U. Pope and Rev. W. Tracy.

The helpful assistant at the museum placed three large, leather-bound albums in front of me. The album, titled "Stereographs of Trichinopoly, Tanjore and other places in the neighbourhood", had 70 plates. Tripe had used a piece of equipment called binocular camera, which was invented in 1849 for use in stereo-photography. The photographs were described as stereoscopic views.

The album opens with a one-page introduction, which said that Tripe completed the work "after a wearying tour through the Trichinopoly, Madura and Tanjore Districts, during the preceding four and a half months". The Rock Fort at Tiruchi seems to have fascinated Tripe. The album contains a number of views of the Fort, including one with the ruins of the main fortification in the foreground. During the Carnatic Wars the British forces blew up this fortification, known as the Main Guard Gate now, and it was repaired much later. One photograph of the Rock Fort has the river Kollidam in the foreground. There are two views of the palace at Thanjavur. Though he photographed the hill temples at Tiruparankun-dram and Tiruchi, he did not take any picture of the view from the hill-top. Maybe the equipment was too heavy to be carried up the hill or the landscape did not interest him. The standard size of his prints is 40 cm X 30 cm but the portraits are much smaller.

A second album was titled "Photographs of Elliot Marbles and Other Subjects in the Central Museum, Madras," published in 1858. It contained 51 photographs of objects at the museum in Madras. A majority of them were the Amaravathi panels, which were in those days referred to as the Elliot marbles. The album has a printed index at the end. The lower end of each page had a 3-cm-long, embossed monogram of the photographer - a circle around the letters 'LT', a stylised figure of the sun on top and the legend 'Photographer for the Govern-ment' around.

Raja Ramachandra Tondaiman of Pudukkottai seated on his throne, another photograph by Capt. Tripe taken in 1858.

These panels, traced to A.D. 3rd century, were once part of a Buddhist stupa at Amaravathi on the banks of the Krishna in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, and lay in ruins there. Chiselled in marble they depict, in relief, the Jataka tales. Tripe had photographed these panels before they were mounted on the walls in the gallery of the museum. Large panels, which could not be taken out, have been photographed in situ. There is evidence that some kind of artificial light source has been used. The album also has photographs of granite sculptures of Vishnu, Sastha and Ambika (Jain) and the tirthankaras, all belonging to the Chola period. The Madras museum, then known as the Central Museum, was housed in an old building called the 'Public Assembly Rooms,' at the spot where the present museum stands. The cracked walls and exposed bricks of the old building could be seen in the photographs. Tripe has recorded that he used a dry collodion process and printed on alumnised paper.

I was also able to see an album of 18 portraits. Evidently Tripe had a studio in Madras where the wealthy and the famous had their pictures taken. There is a photograph of Sir Alexander Arbuthnot and another of Mrs. Orr and her child. There is only one picture of an Indian, the ayah of an infant, who appears in a family portrait. The portraits provide excellent records of the costumes and artefacts of the day. Tripe had also made portraits outside his studio. One of them was the well-known portrait of Raja Ramachandra Tondaiman of Pudukkottai (1858) seated on his ivory throne and surrounded by four courtiers. This photograph, which appears on the jacket of Nicholas Dirks' The Hollow Crown, is from Tripe's album "Photographic Views of Poodoocottah 1858". A copy of this album is with the Asiatic Society of Mumbai.

In recent times, photographs of early British India in archives around the world have evoked a lot of interest. The Toronto Art Gallery exhibition in 1986 focussed on Tripe's works. The brochure "Linnaeus Tripe: Photographs of British India 1854-1870" by Janet Diwan documented his works. The Alkazi Collection of Photography organised an exhibition titled "The Imperial Gaze" in New York last year and there were lectures on photographers in British India, including Tripe.

BUT what the chroniclers have forgotten is the work done by Indian pioneers. G. Thomas, author of History of Photography in India, 1840-1980, records that Tripe's assistant Iyahsawmy, who was a photography instructor at the School of Arts and Crafts in Madras, was a good photographer and produced a number of impressive pictures. He exhibited many of them in annual shows in Madras and attracted a lot of attention. This fact raises some questions: Where are the pictures of Iyahsawmy? Were there other such pioneers? (Thomas' book, published by the Andhra Pradesh State Sahitya Academy of Photography in 1981, features five photographs of Tripe.)

The oeuvre of Tripe reveals him as a photographer par excellence. The compositions are impressive and remind one of the paintings of European masters. He uses the contours of buildings, the architectural and natural features and pathways effectively as elements in the composition. The shadows suggest that he chose late mornings for his shots. Most of the pictures of the monuments do not feature people. In primitive cameras, the exposure time had to be long and any moving object could create a blur. In the few shots that had some people, their stiff postures make it evident that he kept them under control. Tripe used the albumen process and relied on large calotype negatives.

The library assistant at the Victoria and Albert Museum told me that I could photograph the prints. Not being used to such generosity in similar libraries, I had not taken my tripod. So, as my friend held the pages vertically, I quickly copied some of the photographs with my hand-held camera.