South Chowra ghat, Cawnpore

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. This riverside ghat, previously known as an access point for entering the water on religious occasions took on new meaning during the uprising when a group of British soldiers fleeing the rebels were shot as they boarded vessels from the stairs.

The ghat was memorialised in commercial photographs and postcard images, circulated through British channels in India and at home in England to not only recall the losses but to also valorise British efforts in preserving colonial civil life in India.
The British photographer Samuel Bourne visited the town in 1865 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.