Series: Open Knowledge Fellowship 2025
What’s your go to method when you want to see what a place looks like before you visit? Do you use google maps & street view? Scroll through your favourite social media platform or Wikimedia? Or do you prefer the surprise of seeing somewhere new for the first time in person? Prior to the internet, people relied on travellers, painters, and early photographers to show them the world. Among them was Alfred Hugh Fisher, whose photographs of South India (for the British Empire) captured landscapes, monuments…and the lives of people like Tambusami, his assistant and travel companion.
Photography and the making of Empire
Photos are so ubiquitous these days that we rarely stop to think about its power to shape what we see. When William Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature in 1844, he boldly positioned photography as an objective way to depict reality. This exciting new technology went viral pretty quickly; within a decade, photographic societies appeared in London and Bombay, spreading the technology across continents.
Photography required a degree of technical knowledge and equipment, but artistic skill and talent was less of a pre-requisite (indeed, there are still ongoing debates about the artistic merits of photography). Perhaps one of its indisputable advantages was its speed, making it an attractive entrepreneurial endeavour.
One of the first people to realise the entrepreneurial opportunities of photography was Francis Frith
After traveling the Middle East with his camera in the late 1850’s, Frith exploited the commercial value of his photographs and then set up a company back home in the UK and began an ambitious undertaking to photograph every town and village in England, eventually amassing an archive of over 330,000 images covering over 7,000 locations, and is sometimes affectionately referred to as ‘Britain’s first photo album’. Frith even visited and photographed some of the same sites in India as Alfred Hugh Fisher.
But others like Samuel Bourne were quick to follow.
Bourne’s technical skill in pursuit of the ‘picturesque’ India was perhaps unparalleled, as we can see in this remarkably similar photograph to Frifth’s, but his work often resulted in the erasure of local labour, knowledge and histories, as Chirantan Banik discusses in his essay.
Unfortunately, it was also not long before the cogs of imperialism began to leverage the power that photography could wield as a more nefarious tool that aided documentation and control.
In 1902, the British Government established the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC). Its mission was to produce a series of standardised and authoritative lantern-slide lectures that schools could purchase. These lectures were aimed at reinforcing imperial narratives of citizenship through the guise of educating future generations.
To create the visual records, COVIC recruited an established artist called Alfred Hugh Fisher to travel around the empire. After being provided with photographic training, as well as detailed instructions and routes by Halford Mackinder, Fisher set off on his first expedition, which was to include much of South Asia. Between October 1907 and August 1910, Fisher created nearly 4000 photographs, numerous drawings and paintings, as well as detailed notes.
The imperial ideology is unabashedly clear in the first volume of lectures, ‘Eight lectures on India’ by H. J. Mackinder, published by COVIC in 1910. However, the extent of Fisher’s role was to create usable visuals, and he wasn’t really involved in the process of selecting the final lecture images, or the textbooks through which they were framed. Whilst not all of his images were used, for the most part they still exist as a collection of 30 albums, as do the journal-like letters he wrote back to Mackinder describing his travels.
Fisher used these letters to publish his own book, ‘Through India and Burmah with Pen and Brush’ in 1911, in which he described his experiences as “Travel Pictures”.
Does this book give us a chink in the imperial armour that might provide some cracks through which we might be able to explore other stories?
An Adventure into the Archives
A handful of Fisher’s photo albums have been digitised, including ‘Volume II : Ceylon, South India and Burma, December 1907’. Taking this album as a spring-board, and conscious of the un-escapable literal and colonial “lens” of Fisher, I wondered if there might be anything in his work that might reveal the contribution and stories of any of the local people he encountered on his travels.
I began looking through his book for any references to specific people and came across a name, Tambusami, who Fisher refers to as his servant … and so, I embarked on my own adventure to see if I could get to know Tambusami.
My next step was to look through the journal letters that Fisher sent back to Mackinder to try and compare the notes to the text in the book, and how both compared with the photographs in the digitised Volume II. This was a big undertaking, there are about 2000 pages of notes, the book is about 350 pages long, and there are 161 photographs in the album. Whilst I would have like to have made it through all of the handwritten notes, the time I can dedicate to my current adventure is limited, and so I have focused on the shadows of Tambusami in the album, the book, and a section of the notes covering part of their journey together in Southern India, and some extracts from their time in Myanmar, that I hope demonstrates the value of such exploration.
Revealing Tambusami
So what can we find out about Tambusami? Well, not a huge amount, but the handful of glimpses might reveal some interesting aspects about Tambusami and also the dynamics of his relationship with Fisher. They travelled to the north-east, visiting locations in Myanmar such as the Goteik Viaduct, where we learn from Fisher that he considers Tambusami skilled with pots and pans. Finding this episode in Fisher’s manuscript, we discover some more depth to that:
I am glad to say that my “boy” Tambusami is a good cook (he will be “bearer” at Calcutta and then I suppose will call me “Sahib” instead of “Master”).
[RCMS 10/1/1 f.306]
So, leaving dinner in the safe hands of Tambusami, Fisher goes to find views of the viaduct and gorge, presumably taking these photos:
During another passage in Through India and Burmah with Pen and Brush, our intrepid duo are in Kolkata, and we learn from Fisher that Tambusami had long black hair:
“He had bought a grand orange-red scarf with silk flowers on it for this occasion, and with his long black hair tied up behind, had a droll air of vanity mingled with restrained and decorous enjoyment.”
The occasion was a trip to the theatre. Fisher had been advised it would be inappropriate for him to go to the local theatres, but he went and found one near what is now Rabindra Kanan Park, and saw a play called ‘Sarola’, and spotted Tambusami in the crowd quite by chance. When they subsequently travelled to the far north-west, near the border between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, we also learn that Tambusami was a long way truly from his home near Tuticorin.
You can trace parts of their journey in this interactive StoryMap
We may never know what Tambusami looked like, but his traces encourage a deeper reading of Alfred Hugh Fisher’s photographs.
It has been suggested that archives such as those generated by COVIC provide us with an opportunity to apply critical visual literacy to contest ideas of empire. It is important to remember that the only side of the story we have comes to us through Fisher’s colonial lens, but what stands out here are the seemingly genuine snippets about Tambusami’s personality, abilities and ways in which the two interacted. Whilst the aim of Fisher’s work is ultimately part of an imperial drive to create a form of propaganda, it is perhaps possible we can see the beginning of some decolonising cracks in Fisher’s attitude, approach and the seemingly affectionate way in which he interacts with Tambusami.
Another aspect of this, is to think about the way Fisher saw the world and how this might have contrasted with those of his employers.
For instance we know that Fisher considers that “railway journeys with unshuttered windows are like miscellaneous collections of snapshot photographs”, whereas in Mackinder’s view, “the ribbons of landscape seen through the window of a railway carriage” wither the value of a topographical eye. The latter seems almost a direct attack on some of Fisher’s work when we look back over some of the photographs we’ve looked at in the album.
