-
Details
- Place where the work was made
-
Kanpur
→
Uttar Pradesh
→
India
- Date
- circa 1865
- Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- albumen photograph
- Dimensions
- 22.9 x 28.7 cm
- Signature & date
Not signed. Not dated.
- Credit
- Gift of Robert Dein 2021
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 237.2021
- Copyright
- Artist information
-
Samuel Bourne
Works in the collection
- Share
-
About
There is much written about the 1857 Indian uprising against the British occupation of India, also known as the First War of Indian Independence. Generally, it is understood to have been a simultaneous uprising of multiple semi-organised regional resistance groups, believed to have been initiated by disgruntled army officers serving in the British East India Company and then spurred on and supported by local ruling elites. The war only lasted a year, and although Kanpur (Cawnpore) was not an historically important city to the British, it was one of the first places were the uprising ignited with great force and where the British suffered severe casualties. The marble memorial seen in this photograph was built over a well where the bodies of English women and children were said to have been discarded by Indian rebel fighters. The marble angel with folded arms, designed by Sir Henry Yule and carved by Charles Marochetti (1805-67) was completed in the early 1860s. Shortly after its completion the English photographer Samuel Bourne visited the town in 1865 and anticipating the commercial popularity of an image of the memorial, he used three different types of cameras to produce three different size negatives. His photographs became postcard images, circulated through British channels in India and at home in England to not only memorialise the losses but to also valorise British efforts in preserving colonial civil life in India. The success of the images contributed to the general mythology of the site and in the mid-1870s he set up seasonal studio nearby to cater to the influx of tourists as the site became one of many that formed part of a nationalistic pilgrimage to war shrines.1.
1. Sean Willcock, Aesthetic bodies: Posing on sites of violence in India, 1857-1900, History of photography, May 2015, pp 142-159.