Presence of past

CAUGHT ON CAMERA

When the uncle-nephew team of Thomas and William Daniell travelled to the innermost parts of 18th century India in 1786 to paint monuments, landscapes and rural life, little did they know that the 144 aquatints they would produce from their nine-year-long sojourn would centuries later become the muse of a modern photographer.

Italian photographer and Indophile Antonio Martinelli has retraced their steps by visiting those exact locations to recreate Daniells’ painterly works in photographs, as closely as possible. Seventy-three of these selected aquatints with their corresponding photographs, culled from the collection of Victoria Memorial Hall of Kolkata, are now on view in an exhibition titled ‘Oriental Scenery: Yesterday & Today’, at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts in New Delhi till June 30.

This is not Martinelli’s first tryst with India though. He has made as many as thirty-four trips to the country since his first in 1972 and has authored six books on India — the most recent one being an architectural overview of Lucknow, which was launched in Paris recently. But the one project that gets Martinelli most excited about is his love affair with the India that the Daniells recorded on their return to England in 1795. “I was introduced to their work in the 1980s when an Indian friend, Princess Naheed Mazharuddin Khan of Surat, showed me Mildred Archer’s book dedicated to the aquatints produced by these two artists. Some time later, I had the chance to look closely at the original 144 aquatints of their ‘Oriental Scenery’ in the India Office Library in London. The impact that these hand-coloured prints had upon me was profound. I was totally fascinated by their magical, yet startlingly realistic images of India. When I learned that the Daniells framed their landscapes and monuments with the help of an artistic device known as the camera obscura, it made their work comprehensible to me since in many respects it appeared to anticipate photography.”

It was passion alone, perhaps, that did not deter Martinelli from embarking on this ambitious project. While the Daniells had travelled with a mini entourage of nearly 50 people in a safer environment, Martinelli has had no such luxury. Aided only by a driver and an assistant from Garhwal, Martinelli made four trips during 1995-97 and managed to locate and photograph, barring only ten, all the locations visited by Daniells in their 144 aquatints.

“If I could not photograph some ten monuments, it was either because they had totally vanished, or because they had been so radically transformed that they were no longer recognisable. One by one, the aquatints divulged their secrets, but sometimes only after many days of walking along the bed of a mountain stream, carefully approaching the side of a mountain or the turn of a road. Eighteenth-century India is still partly to be discovered, like the enchanted place of a timeless land, barely masked by some 200 years of development,” says the 53-year-old Martinelli.

And what a discovery it was. From Hindu temples to majestic forts, thundering waterfalls to pristine river ghats, Martinelli saw them all, even keeping in mind the season in which the Daniells had visited each place. And the results are astonishing. Strikingly similar to the original structure, and yet different in perspective because of the passage of time, each of Martinelli’s photographs tell a story as evocative as the aquatint it is juxtaposed with.

So you have the ‘bare’ Benaras Ghats of 1780s juxtaposed with the banks now overflowing with people, the grand sweep of the Jama Masjid steps in the aquatint having been replaced by encroachments in Martinelli’s photograph and the small crowning pavilion atop the Qutub Minar that has since been demolished disappearing from the recent picture.

Besides Taj Mahal, Jantar Mantar, Qutub Minar and other popular monuments, the show is replete with lesser known Hindu temples, mosques and tombs as well. “The Daniells were interested in religious architecture,” Martinelli says. Although he had research from the British Library (London) to guide him, some of these monuments were extremely difficult to trace and misidentification by the Daniells certainly didn’t help. For instance, Martinelli discovered that the beautiful tomb of Sultanganj, labelled by the Daniells as the Tomb of Sultan Purveiz, prince Khusrao’s step-brother, was actually the tomb of his sister Nithar begum. Or, that the funeral complex of Chainpur (Bahar) was misidentified by the artist duo as an Idgah.

Amongst the landscapes, the Papanasam Waterfall of Tamil Nadu is one of Daniells’ most dramatic views and is still impressive in the modern day picture, despite the water being siphoned off upstream. “The other challenge, apart from discovering these sites which are still not on any Indian guide book, was to be as honest to the original work as possible,” says Martinelli. Not an easy feat as the Daniells had the advantage of using an optical instrument called the Camera Obscura for the original sketches. The boxy contraption was used to achieve an inverted reflection, the outlines of which had to be traced by hand for an image. “They also took several ‘artistic liberties’ like changing the scale or introducing lighting while making their aquatints, for a better composition. They planned to sell their art and make money,” laughs Martinelli, “I however didn’t have the option of changing things. I was using the modern camera.”

While Martinelli admits he was pleased to find that most of the monuments have survived the ravages of time, he is quick to add a cautionary footnote. “In some places, I was dismayed by the haphazard conservation work that has been done to restore the monuments. The Jantar Mantar observatory in Delhi is one such example,” he says, “cement that has been used has spoiled the original structure.”

In the Elephanta Caves, the damage to the shafts, as recorded by the Daniells, has been repaired with cement too. The clearing of the collapsed rock that appears on the left side of the aquatint revealed a naturally-lit side entrance. The renovation has somehow now altered that original look. Apart from the misgivings he has about “conservation that has in some places been overdone”, Martinelli is also concerned that several of these ASI protected and UNESCO heritage monuments are in the danger of facing destruction.

“If care is not taken, there will be nothing left for the photographers to shoot after 200 years,” says Martinelli. The exhibition, one hopes, will serve its dual purpose, that of a historical documentation and a warning bell!