Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India.
Photographer: William Johnson.
With the clash of arms miles away from earshot, a group of yesteryear palanquin bearers sit gloomy, more worried about earning their daily fare, than the political turmoil that raged across the neighbouring Bengal Presidency, in the year 1858. Possibly, some months after the infamous Sepoy Mutiny had erupted on the 10th of May, 1857.
Turbaned and lightly dressed in their traditional attire of cotton dhotis wrapped tight slightly around the knee, for flexibility and greater motion. The hereditary bearers were Hindu by religion and hailed from the lower strata of Hindu society. On this occasion, they were perhaps waiting to be hired or for a passenger to return when Johnson had captured the scene with his daguerreotype box camera. That now one only gets to see in museums or in the possession of a rare antique collector.
A pioneer in the field.
Counted among British India’s pioneering photographers, though Johnson had arrived in India to work as a civil servant in the East India Company’s Bombay Presidency and later risen to the position of an assistant at the General Administration Department.
His passion and hobby had been to capture the life, times and landscape of Western India, especially her people. A passion that had led him to establish his own photo studio in Bombay in 1852. Produce his own daguerreotypes, albumen silver prints for photographs and later become the founding member, joint secretary and co-editor of the Bombay photographic society, established in 1854.
While never officially assigned by the British Indian Government to document the people for ethnological documentation. Johnson, nonetheless, had spent a good many years of his life photographing the different races that inhabited Western India by their appearance, dress codes, religion, profession and cast.
His work later illustrating several pages of the Indian Amatuer’s Photographic album and more famously the publication: Photographs of Western India. Now noted for its visual ethnological nature and yesteryear photos of landscapes and people.
This photo by Johnson is archived at the Leiden University Library, Netherlands.
