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Raja Deen Dayal: Pictures Without Politics

'First Tiger shot by H.E. Lord Curzon in India, with Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia' (1899). ENLARGE
'First Tiger shot by H.E. Lord Curzon in India, with Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia' (1899). Royal Ontario Museum


Had the show simply been called by its subtitle, "The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal," it might have attracted only those relatively few who have heard of the man. Even though Dayal was arguably the best-known and most successful photographer in 19th-century India, his North American fan base isn't exactly huge. But title the exhibition "Between Princely India and the British Raj," and it acquires an exotic allure. Granted, this stands to draw people to a worthwhile and beautiful show; the downside is that it contradicts its premise.

Between Princely India

And the British Raj:

The Photography

Of Raja Deen Dayal

The Royal Ontario Museum

Through Jan 12

Curated by Deepali Dewan of the Royal Ontario Museum and Deborah Hutton of the College of New Jersey, the show fills a single gallery in the European wing of this rambling, delightfully eclectic museum. As though stepping through a wormhole between European armor and art-deco furniture, you suddenly find yourself in the world of European and Indian elites. Men pose with tigers they've shot and gazelles they've hunted with cheetahs. Crystal chandeliers sparkle in lavishly furnished interiors. Guests don costumes for parties, soldiers line up for review, and visiting dignitaries are greeted with parades that are as noisy and crowded as the views of ruins and picturesque landscapes are peaceful.

Some art historians depict Dayal (1844-1905) as a supporter of the British Raj—he learned photography as a colonial surveyor, and his subsequent work for colonial officers earned him a Royal Warrant from the Queen. Others have read much of his work as a sensitive portrayal of India that bolstered its nationalist cause. Ms. Dewan and Ms. Hutton, however, build a strong case that Dayal, like photographers around the world, was primarily intent on producing the best photographs possible. To do this he borrowed compositions and techniques from Mughal painting, European art and his background as surveyor. He controlled everything from the staging of the shot to its framing and printing, and he experimented with the latest technologies.

This argument grows out of 10 years of research, in which the curators pushed aside received theories and focused on finding facts. "There is an unspoken assumption in the history of photography," Ms. Hutton says, "that more archival material survived for British photographers than did for Indian ones." They interviewed family members, scoured private and state archives and through a combination of perseverance and luck they uncovered sheaves of Dayal's correspondence, notes, receipts, ledgers, and list after list of negatives with every who, what, where and when.

The curators published their findings and some early analysis of photographs in "Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th Century India" (Mapin Publishing and the Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2013). This, in turn, inspired the show, which offers a grand tour of the photographer's studio, Raja Deen Dayal & Sons, Art Photographers, through 100 works and a twin-lens camera that Dayal probably custom ordered from England. A December 1895 group portrait taken in front of the studio in Secunderabad (twin city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh) sets the tone: it shows Dayal and his two sons surrounded by 55 employees, including two European photographers. Altogether, Dayal and his studio produced more than 30,000 new images between 1878 and his death.

A mainstay of the business was studio portraits, 16 of which (dated from around the 1880s to 1904) fill the back wall, their arrangement against a reproduction of Victorian wallpaper evoking a salon hang. Photographs that were commissioned for commemorative and gift albums, on the other hand, are clustered on walls painted green—echoing their leather bindings. We know this from some examples set in cases and a video that imparts a sense of what it would be like to leaf through a lavish album.

What comes across is that Dayal provided a full array of services. He sent photographers—sometimes two or more—to cover events. He offered stock photos from which to choose supplemental images. The studio even bound albums in-house, importing the leather, sometimes making less expensive souvenir copies for the rising professional class. Dayal himself often staged the shots and worked the camera, creating images that British publications reproduced as engraved illustrations. The show includes a particularly notable example: A December 1889 issue of The Graphic copies Dayal's interior shot of a palace Prince Albert visited on a tour of Hyderabad. But with a difference: The engraver added the figure of Prince Albert. At the time, interiors required such long exposures that no photographer in India shot people indoors.

Not, that is, until February 1891, when Dayal took what at first glance looks like a bad picture: an unevenly lighted hall filled with people seated in rows, some with eyes closed, others looking away, while, above their heads, two overexposed areas obliterate all details of ceiling and chandelier. Why, the curators wondered, was this photograph included in an album? The answer lay in newspaper reports. An avid follower of advances in technology, Dayal had, within four years of early experiments with flash powder, imported a "flashlight apparatus" from England and tried it out on the unsuspecting guests of a patron. A month later, as a photograph taken at a banquet held in the same hall attests, Dayal had worked out how to aim the flash and the guests had learned to pose for it.

In the end, one comes away marveling at Dayal's enterprise, not as an Indian or Raj photographer, but as a participant in a vibrant international photography scene. Furthermore, while much of his work chronicled accomplishments of the Raj and its allied Indian nobles, Dayal himself embodied the kind of modern entrepreneurship that would come to supplant their way of life. When, in 1894, the Nizam of Hyderabad hired Dayal as his court photographer, he gave him the title "Raja Bahadur Musavvir Jung"—or "Bold Warrior of Photography." We are, it seems, still discovering how bold.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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