March 3, 2019 Comments Off on Old India in photos Views: 1580 Imago, Looking Back, Nostalgia, Photography

Old India in photos

India is as old as humanity itself. It’s where numbers originate from, and where the world’s first university was established, in Takshila in 700 B.C. Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian and the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, is the mother of all European languages. Which is just a small fraction of the civilizational achievements ascribed to this part of the world.

Modern images of India frequently depict poverty and underdevelopment, although at present India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world. India also used to be the richest country on Earth before the British invasion took place in the early 17th-century. In fact, the majority of photos below are from that period of the country’s long and abundant history. Some of the photos reveal lavish, ancient temples and their most intricate details. Others portray people, daily life, as well as British presence around.

*Municipal Corporation Building, Bombay in 1950 – Victoria Terminus partly visible on far right.*

*Workers at a bangle factory in India in 1930*

*A view of the ruined fort at Bangalore, c. 1860., showing fortifications and barracks. The fort was originally built by* *feudatory ruler Kempe Gowda I as a mud fort in 1537.*

*A view of Bangalore Pete during the 1890s.* *The Bangalore Pete established in 1537 around the Mud Fort built by Kempe Gowda I as the nucleus,* *with roads laid out in the cardinal directions, and entrance gates at the end of each road.*

“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim ‘I do enjoy myself’ or ‘I am horrified’ we are insincere. ‘As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror’ – it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

*Group of women and children in a village – Madura, South India. Date unknown*

*British Government House, Ganesh Khind, Poona (*c. 1875)

*Calcutta: Fort William, headquarters of the British East India Company, c. 1735*

*Chowringhee avenue and Tipu Sultan Mosque in central Calcutta, 1945*

*Bengali billboards on Harrison Street. Calcutta was the largest commercial center in British India, 1945*

*Maharaja’s Palace at Bangalore. Lee-Warner Collection ‘Souvenirs of Kolhapur. Installation of H.H. the Maharajah, 1894’*

*The Durbar Hall, Bangalore Palace (1890; Curzon Collection’s ‘Souvenir of Mysore Album*)

*A marble quarry in Kishangarh Ajmer, in Rajasthan, a state in northern India, Photo credit:* *Singh92karan, CC BY-SA 3.0*

*American soldiers and locals hanging out at the Taj Mahal site in Agra, India 1942. Notice the* *protective wartime scaffolding of the Taj in the photo’s upper right corner*

*Detail of the Taj Mahal mosque, Agra, India, c. 1943, Photo courtesy: John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0*

“In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.”
― E. M. Forster, A Passage to India