From Ajanta's lustrous murals to the rich history of sculptures, women in India have enjoyed a special status in art as the muse, the inspiration, and the model. They have propelled great artistic creations, sensuousness personified. Yet, the real fascination unfolds as the subject transcends the frame and crosses over to the artist's realm, flipping upside-down the multi-fold conventions, barricades of gender, and historical trajectories all at once.
The photographic camera was invented in 1816 and brought to India by colonial hands primarily for anthropological reasons- to document the various castes, tribes, customs, and stack them up in their archives, colored with Oriental biases. Yet in no time, the camera trickled into the middle-class Indian household.
While serving as a great means of capturing genealogies, the camera affected the cultural landscape change. With the emergence of the whole new trend of family photographs, there cropped up one problem, the woman question. Confined within the iron curtains of aristocratic "respectability," the women of the upper-class households were not to be exposed to the glaring lights of the camera and outsider-male gaze, unlike the more unrestrained lower-class woman who could quite often stop to pose for the camera.
This made photographing them a tad more difficult than usual. Yet, this social segregation produced another wonderful phenomenon, the woman photographers! Aristocratic ladies now began to pose before the camera within the unrestrained rooms of the "Zenana Studio."
The first female photographer in India was the European, Mrs. E. Mayer, who opened a studio in the 7 Old Court House Street Corner, Kolkata. The year was 1863, and not too many aristocratic women seem to feature in her photographs. The wave was yet to erupt. The pioneer photographer, Lala Deen Dayal, opened the Zenana Studio in Hyderabad. He hired several foreign and Indian women to work as photographers and assistants and thus became a popular hub of the Muslim Zenanas.
The trend had indeed been triggered. It is interesting how the subjectivity of the "models" spanned across certain themes- while aristocratic women usually posed to be captured and framed in the high walls of their family portraits, young girls were brought before the camera to be shot, passed around, and assessed as suitable candidates for marriage. Although they had crept out of purdah and pushed their walls of modesty to appear before the gaze of the camera lens, the women subjects nonetheless evoked the silent patriarchal gaze binding them.
The rhetoric of revolution, however, materialized behind the cameras. By 1855, Mrs. Wince of Kolkata started advertising for her tutorials on photography for Indian women. The taboo that ran down this much male-dominated profession was diluted with the Brahmo Samaj's endorsing of it as a part of their agenda to push forth women's education.
"In this country, women are unable to learn photography because there is no means to do so. Those women who have the time, the money, and above all, the inclination to be a photographer should never waste this chance. We hope you will seize this opportunity", said a Brahmo Samaj writing in Ananda Bazar Patrika. In 1916, a Brahmo-run art institute for women was opened to cater to photography tuitions. An advertisement read as:
PHOTOGRAPHY
Mrs. Wince, practical photographer,
is prepared to give lessons in the art of photography
to ladies and gentlemen at their own houses,
or to conduct class either in town or mofussils.
Portraits taken at ladies' own houses.
Terms on application to Mrs. Wince,
care of Messrs. W. Newman & Co., 4 Dalhousie Square.
Some Illustrious Women Photographers:
Although witnessing only a handful of women photographers, this period is reminiscent of stunning barrier-breaking moves as the women moved into a realm quite typically masculinized. While accounts of their feats have been marginalized in traditional history, their pioneering efforts are worth celebrating.
The first woman to have had proper training in photography was the third wife of Maharaja of Tripura, Maharani Monmohini, who had found a companion in her husband. While she printed the pictures, he would develop them. Her works found their way into the Photographic Section of the Indian Society's Journal and received great admiration.
Gyanodanondini, one of the most illustrious women of the Tagore family too, ventured into photography and remained the official photographer for the several generations of women in her family. Her compassionate subject of interest was women who could not and would never be photographed. It is indeed a wonder that the brilliance of this woman's art would have lapsed into ignorance for our generation had not her daughter mentioned it in her letters in the first place. Probably inspired by her, Tagore wrote his character Kumudini for a novel ("Jogajog") where she's portrayed as possessing photographic interests.
Photography thereafter became a professional affair, and the first Indian woman who started her own professional studio was Sarojini Ghosh, thereby launching yet another impeccable step. While in the early years, professional photography was greatly reliant on patronage and economic investment and access to societies, which produced some difficulties for women, opening a studio, however, proved to be an act of claiming space and launching her interests.
Known by the name of Mahila Art Studio and Photographic Store, her studio often carried out assignments for Ananda Bazar Patrika. It was adequately praised for her work in the paper. The change in a subject apart from the usual theme of coy middle-class women also signals a woman photographer's professional acceptance on a wider scale.
No one else caused as much a ripple of excitement in the history of women photographers in India than the portrait of a sari-clad woman with the loose end of it covering her head, her hand over the camera shutter ready to operate, her eyes looking away from the lens capturing her, resting steadfast on her subject. She was the first to enjoy a long career in photography. To name her, she is Annapurna Dutta. This was not merely a self-portrait but a defining moment in the emergence of the professional woman photographers.
This woman could first think of building a career in a bourgeoisie world of domesticated morals and then photography. Her clientele included a great row of elite women and apparently was in good terms with the royal Muslim families to whom she rendered her extensive service. Confident in demeanor, her self-portrait bespeaks the changing face of the Indian woman.
Post-independence, several more women were to enter the field. While the persona of the woman photographer had been created to reproduce photographs of the womenfolk along with being protected from the (male) outsider's gaze and thus keep her confined to the socio-moral space as dictated by the middle-class prudery, it is the persona of the woman photographer who had smashed the walls and dared to enter and also make an indelible mark in a world, held to be a preserve of the male.
The woman photographer was a complex position, space where colonial and social barriers on women intersected and were hemmed in with a liberating stance with the emergence of the persona of the woman photographer, all the while also somewhat preserving the imposed segregation. After all, the woman photographer was invented to preserve the societal curtains on middle-class women. It was an intersection of prejudices and moving past the prejudices.
The Indian woman photographer was a culmination of three personae: an Indian in a Colonial India, a woman in a man's world, and a photographer in a space dominated by men. Being a woman photographer in the colonial world meant smashing every barrier these identities implied.
Comments