“My family were pioneers of photography in the Subcontinent”

While clearing a godown in our house in 2015, I chanced upon a wooden box with a sliding cover. On close inspection, it contained ten 10”x12” B&W glass negatives photographed between c. 1897 to 1910, covered in cobwebs and fungus. It turned out to be part of my grandfather’s photographic portfolio.

Dapper young men in Bombay

When I was growing up, our home too had several photo albums – the ones with black pages and deckle-edged black and white photos affixed with photo corners. One afternoon, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), my mother and I began organising the albums sticking back some photos that had come loose. There we were pouring over pictures of what could best be called a rather haphazardly maintained record of the last two generations of my family’s middle-class existence.