![]() ![]() Baniyas in particular supported the British because they had provided stable conditions for trade. The fact that they didn’t means that a greater proportion of Indians were prepared to tolerate, and in some cases to welcome, British rule. Obviously if the majority of Indians had opposed the British, then the East India Company would have been finished immediately. ![]() What percentage of Indians collaborated with the British to quell the uprising? How deep were the divisions of caste, religion and class among Indians? There were only 100,000 Britishers, against a population of 250 million in the mid-1850s. The literacy rate among British men was about 60% in the 1850s, less among women, so pictures did have a greater appeal than the written word among the lower classes. Photographs of the uprising were exhibited in London in 1858 to a limited audience and later published in expensive albums. Were the illustrations and photographs of the uprising more popular in the UK than the accounts? If so, why? Credit: The Alkazi Collection of Photography The London Printing and Publishing Company Limited ‘Capture of a Gun at Banda’ from the book The History of the Indian Mutiny by Charles Ball, 1857. Indians were not shown as particularly villainous, but as well-armed men killing British men and women. Of course no-one was sitting on the bank of the Ganges with a sketchbook, but these pictures seeped into the British subconscious. It wasn’t possible at the time to print magazines with photographs, so they were copied by lithographers.īut two books published in England in 1858 used a mixture of lithographed photographs and some wildly imaginative sketches, in particular of the Cawnpore (now Kanpur)massacres, which have often been reproduced as genuine pictures of what actually happened. Many of the lithographs published in Britain, particularly those in the Illustrated London News, a weekly magazine, were accurate because they were engraved from photographs. How far did the lithographs and British accounts circulated in the UK deviate from the truth? To what extent were the Indians portrayed as villains and the British as knights in shining armour? Who were the consumers? Previous books have included the work of Raja Deen Dayal, the Delhi Coronation Durbars, and my earlier book Lucknow, City of Illusion. I was commissioned by Ebrahim Alkazi to edit the book, the last in a series showcasing various aspects of his large collection (over 90,000 images). Of course, the 1957 book was poorly produced… There are paintings of the Rani of Jhansi in the battlefield and of the arrest of Bahadur Shah Zafar and of the death of his sons. Great book and great images, but why did you choose to work with the Alkazi collection of photographs alone? The book, titled 1 857: A Pictorial Presentation published by the Indian government in 1957 to mark the centenary of the Uprising has a wider range of images culled from diverse sources. In an interview conducted via email, the historian talks about the fascinating images: It examines the upheaval from multiple perspectives. The book, The Alkazi Collection of Photography: The Uprising of 1857, edited by London-based historian Rosie Llewellyn Jones, examines the infamous “sepoy revolt”, which was the second war – after the Crimean war – to be fully photographed anywhere in the world. The East India Company arrived in India in the 17th century, and by the 19th century had appropriated the entire sub-continent “through treaties, trade, through war, and latterly, as in the case of Awadh, through annexation”. Courtesy: Alkazi Collection of Photography Felice Beato took this photograph of Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi in 1858. ![]()
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