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MADRAS MISCELLANY

Back in Madras recently was Dr. Joachim K. Bautze of the Asian Studies Institute, Heidelberg, an art historian who is an expert on old photographs of India and who was here to help organise an exhibition of old Madras photographs that are held by Vintage Vignettes. The exhibition, being organised by Max Mueller Bhavan, Madras, is scheduled for early next year.

Bautze, who has been visiting India regularly from 1974 – spending much time in Calcutta and Rajasthan – has recently been visiting Madras more regularly, ever since he got interested in that famed late 19th Century city studio owned by E.U.F. Wiele and Theodor Klein that became Klein & (Michael) Peyerl, the Klein in the mid-20th Century becoming Valeska Klein, Theodor’s widow. Wiele was German, Wiele is a German name, Bautze insists. But the records of the time speak of Wiele as having been British. And British he may well have been like Louis Mountbatten and Prince Phillip, among others.

With him, Bautze brought his latest publication, Das Koloniale Indien: Photographien von 1855 bis 1910, as striking a collection of old photographs of India as anyone could hope for. My only disappointment with the splendidly produced book – apart from it being in German and making me wish for an English edition that would help update me on the old photographers of India – is that it is rather short of Madras pictures, including those of the firm Bautze is very likely the authority on today, Wiele & Klein.

Of the 800 or so pictures in the book, only about half a dozen are of Madras or the Presidency – and that strikes me as being a bit disproportionate given that honour roll of Madras photographers out of the past. Besides Wiele and Klein and Peyerl, there were C. Nicholas & Co, Christopher Penn, Willie Burke, Linnaeus Tripe and several others.

The only Wiele & Klein pictures are the famous 1895 one of tree-shaded Mowbray’s Road and an 1890 one I hadn’t seen before of the Tudor (tea) Estate, Coonoor, besides one from the 1911 Durbar in Delhi which they photographed extensively and sold numerous prints of. Other Madras pictures include the one I feature today – and which I wish had been available to me for my recent pictorial history of the Port of Madras, Overcoming Challenge. This picture of the first pier in Madras – which got the Harbour started – is dated to c.1875 and attributed to ‘Frith’s Universal Series’ (Studio Frith being a new name to me). The pier was first opened in 1861 but after it was damaged by storms in 1868 and 1871, it was reconstructed as part of the first enclosed (breakwater-protected) harbour, work on which began again in 1876 and which, after once more being affected by storms, was nearly completed in 1881, when a cyclone battered it. Putting all that together, I would date the picture to around 1878, before the 1881 storm. Be that as it may, the picture clearly shows the iron pier, the kind of shipping of the day and the city’s famed masula boats.

Nicholas & Co’s contribution to the book is an 1880 picture of the yard of the Madras Carrying Company – the carriages and buggies it rented and its clientele clearly seen. Willie Burke of Madras and Ootacamund has a fine portrait dating to 1901 of Governor Sir Arthur Elibank Havelock with two little Indian princes, taken shortly before he left after his five-year stint. Of Christopher Penn’s work there’s a picture in the book, Bautze insists, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. Perhaps when he’s next here he’ll find it for me. And Tripe doesn’t figure in it at all.

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