Historical Sikh Photographs

Amandeep Singh Madra

Young Nihang. Chris Lisle/CORBIS

Last one hundred and fifty years have seen a period of incredible changes in the fortunes and development of the Sikh people. For Sikhs, the last century and a half saw a sovereign Sikh kingdom, two major wars, life under a British Empire, two World Wars and the freedom movement. Over the last fifty years alone, Sikhs have seen independence followed by incredible prosperity and a failed charge at self-governance. At an international level the last fifty years witnessed the coming of age of Sikh diaspora around the world.

The last one hundred and fifty years also coincide with the development of photography. In 1849, on the eve of the Second Anglo Sikh War that ended the kingdom created by the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, John McCosh took the first grainy shots of the Sikhs and the palaces of Lahore. Since then the incredible history of Sikhs has been played out in front of the camera’s lens. McCosh heralded the first of the military photographers who went on to capture Sikhs in the British Army. Early Victorian photographs of Sikhs highlight attitudes connected with the British presence in India, indicating both the power of photography as a colonial tool of classification and appropriation. Photographic medium was later used for wartime propaganda and as an anthropological research tool.

Sikh soldiers in Jerusalem, during Ramadan. EM Newman

In the heyday of British rule in Punjab wealthy Sikhs and other Indians had started to use photography to capture mundane realities of life in turn of the century Punjab, revealing details vital to the researcher, historian and general public. During the period of the Second World War and Indian independence, a series of press photographers, official photographers and ordinary people captured forever the often-cataclysmic events that shaped the history of the Sikh people.

Margaret Bourke White’s powerful and heart-rending photography for Time magazine of the mass exodus of Sikhs during Partition bears witness to the power of the photograph to record the impact of events on people.

Remarkably, no central resource exists to catalogue or view these important Sikh related images. This is partly because of the democratic nature of the photograph and partly because recent history has often been overlooked by collecting institutes. Such a resource would create a central source of information for images, which would shed light on Sikh history and give the historian, the publisher and the writer valuable insight into the intimate and often routine details involved in some of the greatest changes in the Sikh community.

Officers of the 45th Sikh in a Christmas card sent home to their families in 1903 (NAM)

Creation of a central Sikh photographic archive would exploit in an important way the global nature of some of the new internet technologies that are available today. Given the global nature of the Sikh community a web-based resource could bring items of Sikh heritage to members of the community around the world. A central database of images would not just be a valuable research tool in it’s own right but could also give rise to printed catalogues of images, an online photo-library and CD-ROMS.

Sikh Lady, Southhall, UK, 1979

Further development of the archive by commissioning of photographic documentaries and survey work (architectural, landscape and manuscript based) could add considerable valuable material to the archive.

The UK collections are very well understood and, to a large extent, already well catalogued by Parmjit Singh and I. The US collections, whilst thinner are generally well understood and have been surveyed. Indian resources are likely to provide the largest resource for the more modern period (1947-current). There are a number of private collections with individuals in India that could be purchased outright, and the rights to reproduce smaller collections in public institutions can be negotiated. Given the immediacy of the material and nature of the audience this is also likely to attract the greatest interest.