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Vijayanagara

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Vijayanagara: Splendour in ruins Edited by George Michell, The Alkazi Collection of Photography, Mapin, Unesco, Price not mentioned

“The pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it,” wrote a Persian envoy to the court of King Devaraya II in the mid-15th century, about what he saw of the splendour of Vijayanagara. Abdur Razzaq — like the many European travellers who left wondrous accounts in the 15th and 16th centuries — was talking about the military empire founded in the wake of the Muslim invasions of peninsular India, stretching across the entire South India except for the Kerala coast. What became a showpiece of imperial magnificence lasted until the catastrophic battle of Talikota in 1565. Since then, pillaging armies, centuries of treasure-seekers and Time itself have turned it into one of the world’s most magnificent ruins, drawing artists, photographers and archaeologists from the earliest years of the 19th century, as did the ruins of Rome and Athens. This is the colonial and postcolonial story of how a tragic monument of the history of South India became a Unesco World Heritage site in 1986.

George Michell, an architect and archaeologist, has co-directed a team of researchers at the Vijayanagara site between 1980 and 2001. He has put together in Vijayanagara: Splendour in Ruins a richly layered, meticulously documented and beautifully designed photographic and historical archive. Many histories converge in this volume. First, a political, cultural and, more specifically, architectural history of the Vijayanagara kingdom, succinctly documented by Anila Verghese, and deftly laid out in Michell’s maps, plans and detailed, site-specific account of the entire spread of the ruins. Second, the book provides a specialized visual history of British colonialism, in its efforts to document, represent and interpret the Vijayanagara ruins in various media from around the year 1800, when the site came under British rule.

Finally, and perhaps most splendidly, Splendour in Ruins is a major contribution to the history of photography, drawing from the Alkazi Collection of Photography (an archive of 19th- and early-20th-century photographic prints, negatives and albums from South and South-east Asia), and setting new standards in the curation, interpretation and reproduction of early photography in India. The preface by the Australian architectural photographer, John Gollings, brings to the book’s images acute technical and creative insights gained from trying to retrace the practice of these 19th-century photographers of Vijayanagara with modern equipment. Gollings’s own work had pinpointed the exact spots where they had pitched their tripods a century and a half ago, much as Christopher Rauschenberg has “rephotographed” Eugène Atget’s Paris. Sophie Gordon and Mike Ware’s essays on the photographers and on the processes by which they made their images work into this book the “archive fever” that could enliven the work of historians as well as photographers.

All the photographs reproduced above are positives made in 2007 from more than a hundred “waxed-paper negatives” left by Alexander Greenlaw (1818-70). He was an Englishman stationed at the British cantonment at Bellary from 1863, was transferred to Burma, and came back to India to die and be buried in Coonoor. Greenlaw, who knew Hindi and Tamil and was the official interpreter to the corps, made these photographs as a “committed amateur”, not as a government commission but “purely to satisfy a personal desire to explore the site”. Only the negatives, and no prints, survive, and most of the former were made in 1856. But Greenlaw’s name has become part of the history of photography not only because of the beauty of his images, but also because of his adaptation of Henry Talbot’s calotype method of photography, already a “dying process” then, to Indian conditions of light, temperature and humidity. The two images (bottom right) of the Narasimha monolith, allow one to compare the modern positive with Greenlaw’s negative, remarkable for its sheer size (445x402 mm). He worked in a large format demanding small apertures and long exposures.

On the left, is Greenlaw’s remarkably sharp view of the east gopura of the Virupaksha Temple. The background is blank and cloudless because the blue sky always exposes as white on paper negatives, while warm and coloured stone comes out much darker than is apparent. Top right is the King’s Balance in front of a double-storeyed gateway by the Tungabhadra river. This balance weighed the Vijayanagara rulers against jewels and coins, which were then distributed to Brahmins. Greenlaw keeps his bare-bodied and turbaned local assistants in the frame; in architectural photography, this usually indicated the scale. But these human presences, one of them asleep on the ancient stone, become traces of yet another history, which photography saves from oblivion, if not from silence and slow time.

AVEEK SEN
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