Its refreshing to visit such exhibitions to connect to our roots, to see how much we have evolved and also to check if we are actually moving in the right direction.
Yes Im talking about an exhibition of about 63 monochrome frames by the premier Indian royal photographer, Raja Deen Dayal, which was being presented by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and was unveiled at the State Art Gallery on 11th March.
This Unique exhibition will continue till March 16th. It is a noteworthy collection as it throws light into the royal days of the Nizams and the British Raj.
The cultural archives of IGNCA acquired the photographs from Dayal's family in 1989 along with photographic materials and studio equipment. His descendents still run studios in Hyderabad. Central to the collection are 2,857 glass plate negatives and prints. The exhibition also has digital reproductions of the negatives.
Lala Deen Dayal, was also known as Raja Deen Dayal.
We were being told that Deen Dayal's professional shift from draftsmanship to photography also reflected an earlier policy change when the colonial administration began to replace draftsmen and engravers with photographers, especially for documenting heritage sites and monuments.
Dayal's photographs contains the views, scenery and glimpses of India, which not only became popular in Britain and among the Indian nobility, but also largely shaped the archaeological archives and texts of early art-historical writings.
His career began in the mid-1870s as a commissioned photographer; eventually he set up studios in Indore, Mumbai and Hyderbad. He became the court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad,Mahbub Ali Khan, Asif Jah VI ,who awarded him the title Musawwir Jung Raja Bahadur, and he was appointed as the photographer to the Viceroy of India in 1885.
He received the Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria in 1897
Using a large format camera, Dayal captured royal and European life in great detail. He would use customized lens. Photographs then were developed using the wet Collodion process. This was a tedious and inconvenient process as photographs had to be developed within 15 minutes and so required a darkroom in the field.
Some of Dayal's visuals that catch attention are of the Shikhar Camp of the Sixth Nizam (1894), the hunting expedition of King George V (1911) and various other images.
After Glancing these Images i felt a few moments ago i was in 2013 and suddenly I had traveled almost 125 years in time, to the India of the late 1800s!
Medieval forts and palaces, long abandoned even 100 years ago; new cities of Bombay and Kolkata, unspoilt and uncrowded; Red Fort's Diwai-e-Khas and the Jama Masjid of Delhi, 'only' 28 years after the mutiny/revolution; the Nizams of Hyderabad, their noblemen and their families in all their royal splendor; the hunting parties; the foreigners who traveled to catch a glimpse of the exotic; the Kings and Queens and Princes lording above the poor natives who sadly still remain in more or less the same condition- all of this seen through, photographed and recorded for posterity by the keen eye of India's pioneering photographer, Raja Deen Dayal.
For hours we roamed amidst these images framed on walls, images of a distant yet vaguely familiar India, because the more India changes, the more it remains same.
The PRINCE OF PHOTOGRAPHERS Truely Amazed Us..
Yaashmin Maddeha, NDTV Indiacan, Guwahati
