Photographing Imperialism, Part Two

Samuel Borne: Kashmirand the Aesthetics ofConquest

In her seminal book, British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch (1857), Harriet Martineau called India
our great Asiatic dependency and described the Himalayas as a steep slope like a diversified wall
with embrasures, covering an area of from 90 to 120 miles in breadth, and running a line of 1,500
miles. From a time beyond record the ridge of this slope has been called by the people who live
below it is the Abode of Cold or of SnowHimlaya. She continued to explain the meaning of the
motion range to the British people, ..we need not scruple to mount the Abode of Coldto the very
palace of the old divinityand use his standpoint, and borrow his eyes, for our survey of our own
dominions lying below. This is an elegant statement of Empire, clearly linking the divine right to rule
borrowed by the English people from god with exploration which was in turn coupled to imperialism.
Indeed, understanding the journeys of Samuel Bourne into the Himalayas it is necessary to
understand The Great Game. The Himalayas are a long and majestic mountain range that runs the
entire border of northern India. Most of the Himalayas lie along the border of China and India, but
Bournes destination was a small portion of the mountains, a territory contingent to British controlled
India, the independent (as of 1846) kingdom of Kashmir. Kashmir, lying north and just outside of
direct British interests was interesting the the Empire because this part of the range erected a
formidable barrier to invasion from Russia and was cut by trade routes that were vital to the
interests of trade and commerce.

For the second half of the nineteenth century, the Empires of England and Russia fought a long and
silent cold war,struggling for control of the various stan territoriesAfghanistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistanthat stood between them both. An examination of the modern
maps, with all these territories clearly spelled out also explains the Crimean War (1853-1856) in
which England and France joined forces with Turkey against Russia in order to prevent the Eastern
Empire from threatening the Ottoman Empire along the Danube River. Russia was also threatening
the British hold on India along the northern borders, thwarted only by the mountains and the buffer
zone of territories such as Afghanistan, which both Empires attempted to control, a task that has
historically proven to be impossible. In point of fact, the first English photographer to explore the
Himalayas was James Burke who entered into the contested zone during the First Afghan War and
the First and Second Sikh Wars, early skirmishes in the Great Game. In his 2002 book,From Kashmir
to Kabul: The Photographs of Burke and Baker, 1860-1900,Omar Kahn referred to the colonial
imaginations conquest of Kashmir. What Kahn was describing was an emotional investment on the
part of the British in what was essentially a fantasy that would be created by an English eye that
sought both the familiarforests, lakes, and villageswhile also glorying in the majesty of mist-veiled
peaks that ascended into the clouds while below two conquering giants engaged in feints towards
one another in the valleys below.

The Great Game was a chess match between two burgeoning Empires, a game, which given the
difficult territory, was a contest neither could win. For the British, Kashmir was a mysterious region
at the edges of its official borders, a land of legend and myth. Today, Kashmir, a largely Muslim
territory is described as Indian-controlled, a euphemism that elides the fact that Kashmir is divided
between Pakistan and India and that the Indian part of Kashmir has been engaged in a decades long
and bloody struggle to separate itself from the clutches of the massive continent. In the 1860s,

politically, Kashmir was a buffer zone, in a time of imperialism, the Himalayas were places to be
explored and conquered, mapped and tamed by the ever expanding British interests. When Bourne
photographed the Memorial for the fallen at Cawnpore, the framing of the architectural homage to
the fallen was an obligatory stop for any photographer of Empire, but his eyes were set on places
less conquered and claimed by his predecessors. Like other photographers in India, Bourne was a
professional, making all the steps and stops expected by the home audience identifying itself with
the conquests of the British Empire, while seeking new scenes not so familiar. In his three
excursions into Kashmir, from 1863-1869, Bourne left behind the urban areas of India and the
culture he held in a certain amount of contempt and entered the realm of the sublime. In November
of 1862 he wrote,
What a mighty unbarring of mountains! it was impossible to gaze on this tumultuous sea of
mountains with being deeply affected with their terrible majesty and awful grandeur, without an
elevation of the Sous capacities, and without a silent uplifting of the heart to Him who formed such
stupendous works, whose eye alone has scanned the red depths of their sunless recesses, and whose
presence only has rested on their mysterious and sublime elevations; and it must be to the credit of
Photography that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these, and
renders itmore susceptible of their sweet and elevating impression.

Wooded Valley from Fulaldarn with the Srikanta Peaks in the Distance(1860s)
The Kashmir beckoned Bourne, attracted by its relative inaccessibility and remoteness and the
legends that still cling to the very name itself. The Himalayas must have seemed to Bourne to be
amenable to the categories of British landscape painting, especially the sublime. Just as in the
American West, the colonizing mindset would have framed the aesthetics of photographing the
unknown in a way to make the strangeness seem both novel and familiar at the same time. In other
words, during his three treks into the Himalayas, Bourne familiarized himself and his audience with
the magnificant scenery of Kashmir while, asSandeep Banerjeepointed out in his 2014 article Not
Altogether Unpicturesque: Samuel Bourne and the Landscaping of the Victorian Himalaya, the
photographer tamed the sublime into the picturesque. But Bournes description of his own work,
evokes his personal feelings of awe and wonder, evoking poetics,What a mighty up bearing of
mountains! What an endless vista go gigantic ranges and valleys, untold and unknown! Peak rose
above peak, summit above summit, range above and beyond range, innumerable and boundless,
until the mind refused to follow the eye in its attempt to comprehend the whole in one grand
conception.

Samuel Bourne.Poplar Avenue. Srinagar. Kashmir (1864)