ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA

Photographs in the India Office Collections in the British Library, London

Publisher's Note

India was at the vanguard of the use of photography in recording its cultural heritage. Even though the wet-collodian process of producing photographs was only pioneered by Frederick Scott-Archer in the mid-1850’s, government–sponsored teams of photographers were actively scanning the Indian landscape from the 1850’s onwards.

The main focus of the Archaeological Survey was buildings and monuments, be they ruins in the jungle, palaces set on lakes, or buildings in the congested urban centres. The capacity of the new process to capture minute details and textured surfaces resulted in the government choosing photography as the medium in which to record India’s cultural landscape. The early photographs were consciously artistic and expressive. They provided unique documentary evidence of Hindu sculptures and Mughal architecture.

Edmund David Lyon was one of the earliest photographers paid to undertake a regional survey and he noted that he “traversed the whole of the southern part of the Peninsular, the whole of Mysore, Bellary, the ruined city of Vizianuggur and Tarputry, a distance a little short of 2,000 miles.” The process took seven months.

The aesthetic impact of exhibitions of such photographs, in London in 1866 and Paris in 1867, led to the formal establishment of the Archaeological Survey in 1871 and the employment of archaeological specialists to undertake the work.

Later surveys (arranged here by geographic area or “circle”) were more thorough in attempting to provide a record of a world at a time of great change. The photographs chronicle destruction, neglect, rebuilding and full restorations and excavations.
Much of what was recorded no longer exists, due to erosion, urban sprawl, war and theft.

The Archaeological Survey of India Photograph Collection survives as an indispensable record of Indian architecture and of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim cultural heritage. It encompasses all of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Beluchistan, Kashmir and the North West Frontier.

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