This week, get a peek into the past

Anjali Joseph / TNN / Dec 3, 2006, 00:30 IST

Text Size

Small
Medium
Large

In the days before digital cameras, there was only one way to impress your friends at home with your travels.

MUMBAI: In the days before digital cameras, there was only one way to impress your friends at home with your travels. That was with the images created by artists who travelled to exotic locations, including India, and created pictures: maps, prints (lithographs, woodcuts and steel engravings) and watercolours reproduced in books.
Now, an exhibition opening next Tuesday at Cymroza Art Gallery, Breach Candy, showcases many of those images of Mumbai in the days of the British raj.
Dilnavaz Mehta, who has curated the exhibition, says that finding copies of the prints and books depicting India from the 18th century onwards is made more difficult by the lack of awareness about prints.
"People don’t take care of books in any case and, especially in Mumbai, we have a lack of space to store them well," she says. Mehta, who has made a profession out of what started as a hobby of collecting prints, says that there are few dealers of antique prints and books who maintain professional catalogues. This contrasts with more mature markets in Britain and Europe.

Life was not easy for the early artists who came to India to capture the fascinatingly exotic landscape and people for audiences at home in Europe. "During the early days of the East India Company, artists who wanted to come to India had to get a permit from the Company first.
To do so, they needed to show that they had enough funds to support themselves so that they would not go around looking for charity when they arrived; they also had to provide a letter of introduction, a sponsor in India who would vouch for them, and they even had to show that they had a passage booked as there was a shortage of berths on ships to India," says Mehta. That ought to make today’s visa-seekers to the United States feel better.

Among the most successful of the earlier artists were the uncle and nephew team of William and Thomas Daniels who, in the early 19th century, published a large two-volume folio of Oriental Scenery. The books were popular enough for them to be reissued again in a smaller and more affordable edition in 1811.
"This edition is very rare. The Daniels not only drew the original pictures but, unlike some artists, they also engraved their own plates and then did their own hand-colouring of the black-and-white tints," says Mehta.
A set of these prints is included in the exhibition.
Since Mumbai developed importance only later during the Raj, there are more prints and books focusing on Calcutta (now Kolkata), Delhi and the north, particularly given the 18th- and 19th-century fascination with the "picturesque".
Ruined tombs amid extravagantly Romantic landscapes were in better supply in northern India than in Mumbai. But the exhibition does include Mumbai-based exhibits, including some early woodcuts showing J J Hospital and a lithograph of the Bazaar area in Mumbai. A book published in the 1940s details "Motor-runs of Bombay", or small excursions that could be made by car to the nearby hills and villages, as well as where to stop for tea en route.

End of Article