History in photo pose

SHOWCASE

I first began to look at photographs because the women I was interviewing — participants in India’s freedom struggle — insisted I could learn something about the movement and their involvement in it by looking at images. “Look,” one woman said as she pointed to a picture of a woman picketing a cloth shop. A few policemen and a much larger crowd of onlookers surrounded the woman in the photograph. My informant was right. The photo captured something about the mood of the times that journalists had missed. This photograph suggested that the male onlookers, regardless of their political opinions, would have attacked the police if they had touched the woman picketing. Other stories women told me when they showed me their photographs were more personal and helped me understand their participation more fully than I could from reading conventional documents.

My interest is in focusing attention on photographs as historical documents. Historians rely heavily on print documents such as official records and newspaper reports and personal accounts found in memoirs and autobiographies, letters and diaries. Treating photographs as documents, just as valuable as newspaper accounts and letters, presents both challenges and opportunities for historians. Photographs are a rich source for women’s history and the importance of context for “reading” photographs cannot be stressed enough. I hope to motivate readers to treat their own collections as historical documents and preserve them for their families and the larger project of writing history.

Indians embraced photography soon after it was introduced to the sub-continent in the 1840s. By the 1850s, men in Bengal and Bombay were joining photographic societies, opening studios, and experimenting with and exhibiting photographs. Princes and rajas spent lavishly on the newest equipment, set up private studios, and developed new processes. For some of these men, photography was a status symbol, for others it was synonymous with science, while others found it an interesting hobby. However, for all of them, photography was modern and by patronising it they joined forces with those who looked to the future and not the past. By the end of the 19th century, elite and middle class families were creating family albums.

The photographs I collected were copied from the collections of families residing in Kolkata and Mumbai. The women whose photographs I examined were born between 1900 and 1910 and influenced by a wide range of social and political movements.

Their families were middle class, urban and professional, and patronised photographic studios and often took their own photos. In each case, I spent time with women from these families and listened to their recollections about their family photographs.
Most collections included women photographed at the time of marriage (1); with their children (3); in large family portraits; and sometimes in old age; In what I call “progressive families” — those interested in new roles for women — there were school and graduation photos; photos of girls with their friends; and images of women taking part in social and political activities. As contemporary authors have noted, family collections are notorious for their omission of pain, ill-health, discord, and rupture. This was certainly true of families during the colonial period. Moreover, photographs were considered so serious that one rarely finds people hamming it up or posing for fun.

Standing out among hundreds of conventional family photographs are a number that do not seem to fit. Among these are images of women engaged in a wide range of activities from riding mules (6) to rowing boats and driving cars (5). There are also photographs of women posed in unusual attire, where they literally “let their hair down.”

I am especially interested in what these unusual images signify. Do they speak to a new sense of self and women’s emerging autonomy? Or, were these women play-acting, temporarily escaping from conformity to norms and values? Or, should we see them as representative of family culture? Rather than speaking to the issue of autonomy, do these photographs record conformity to new family values and patterns of behaviour?

Space does not permit a discussion of all these unusual photos, so I will select one to analyse in terms of what I know about the photographs, the socio-political context, and the memories of individuals(2). This photograph of young women wearing flying helmets and standing in front of an airplane actually records a non-event at the 1931 Karachi Congress. The Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-31 was significant in terms of the number of women who joined, demonstrated, picketed, and went to jail. Although women had been visible politically since 1917, when they formed a delegation to meet Lord Montagu and asked for the vote, their numbers were few until 1930. The 1928 Congress session in Calcutta, where young women as well as young men marched in uniform, was the beginning of a trend.

Young women, with more opportunities for education and a later age of marriage, threw themselves into the movement. They would prove, some of them said, that they were as brave and patriotic as young men. Significantly, many of these young women insisted on forming their own organisations and setting their own agenda for demonstrations and picketing.

The 1931 Congress was well financed and well organised with plenty of young women volunteers. One of these was Manmohini Zutshi (1909-1994), the daughter of Motilal Nehru’s nephew and his wife Lado Rani. Keenly interested in the new opportunities available for women’s education, Lado Rani in 1917 moved with her four daughters to Lahore. In Lahore, she enrolled her daughters in missionary schools and arranged for private music lessons (4) while she learned to ride a bicycle and joined a women’s club. After Motilal became president of the Indian National Congress in 1919, Lado Rani and her daughters became staunch supporters of the freedom struggle.

Manmohini and her sisters were among the first girls in their community to complete BA and MA degrees (7). Manmohini first attended Kinnaird College, and then took the unusual step of joining the Government College for Men in Lahore. A skilled debater, she took a keen interest in student affairs and joined the Lahore Student Union, becoming its first female president in 1929. Although she belonged to the Indian National Congress and called herself a Gandhian, Manmohini admired the revolutionaries and applauded their actions. Following Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930, Manmohini organised protests, demonstrated, courted arrest, and was sentenced to prison on three separate occasions.

At the 1931 Congress meeting, Manmohini was a minor celebrity, beseeched by young women and men for her autograph and frequently snapped by Brownie cameras. When a young man offered to drive her and her friends to an airstrip where a small plane had landed, he soon had a car full of single women in their late teens and early 20s ready for an adventure. The young women donned helmets and prepared for a flight that never happened. However, the fact there was no flight is of little importance compared to what this photograph represents in terms of female autonomy in the early 1930s. Gandhi’s initiatives legitimated independent political action by young men and women that made possible new friendships and adventures. At the same time, these educated and self-assured young women gave the North Indian movement a youthful, self-confident and glamorous image.

My example (2) is meant as a  caution against “reading” photographs without investigating all the aspects one would check if reading a personal document such as a letter, or in our time, an email note. Like emails, photographs are frequently cropped, edited, and forwarded and it is difficult to know which is the original.
When we place these unusual photographs within the context of the family collections where they were found, we find more conformity and less rebellion than a presentistic read might yield. The women who were photographed riding camels, donkeys, and bicycles; wearing shorts and jodhpurs; and letting their hair down (8), belonged to families that encouraged female autonomy within limits. The photographs were not discarded, judged too blurry or over/ under exposed to keep, but instead preserved with those of graduations, weddings, and other significant events.

These photographs belonged to a time of extraordinary experimentation in women’s roles throughout the world. India was not an exception to what was happening in other countries and the women in these photographs belonged to families which saw themselves as modern and patriotic. The two were not viewed as contradictory and the fiercely patriotic Lado Rani (riding the donkey) sought out English classes for her daughters and then argued with missionary teachers over politics. She encouraged her daughters to pursue their studies, become political activists and apply for jobs, but also wanted them to marry and have children. In many cases, the autonomous actions of these young women  received family approval.

The value of these photographs is in the issues they raise, as much as the clues (not answers) they give, to questions about women’s autonomy, representation, modernity and family culture. Many historians have written about women joining the Gandhian movement in the 1930s and concluded that the nationalist movement subsumed a nascent feminist movement. But focusing solely on the dynamics of the political movement obfuscates what was going on within families. These documents add a new dimension to our understanding of subtle changes within families, changes  that are not easily captured in conventional records.