Iran: Modernity, Photography and the Painter’s Dilemma

by Sussan Babaie 

It is commonly assumed, in much of scholarship on 19^th-century photography, that the introduction of the new technology to societies outside Europe and especially those in Asia was so irresistible to have upended, almost automatically, the local ‘traditions’ of image making and especially of portraiture. The story of photography in Iran, where it arrived early in the 1850s offers a cautionary example of the complexity of that transition from tradition to modernity. This talk focuses on a single painting dated to 1854-1855 which depicts a photographer in the process of taking a daguerreotype picture of a seated man. This in fact is a portrait of the making of a portrait: one is with brushes, watercolours, and inks on paper; the other with a camera. The two modes of representation clash over their disparate concepts of ‘reality’ and its hold onto portraiture. When photography arrived, I argue, there was already a movement underway towards making visible an idea of ‘likeness’ in portraiture. That idea was not of European origin but had filtered in through the tight-knit cultural worlds spanning West and South Asia, especially through their shared linguistic and literary predilections across the Persianate sphere. Here, I shall argue that artistic reverberations across Iran and India in the case of portraiture, had already prepared the scene for that transition to modernity. Photography had of course immense role to play but not everything was so simply and slavishly surrendered to the new. The painting of a photographer by Mirza Riza Tabrizi asks us to rethink such facile conclusions.

Image: A Scene of Photography, Mirza Riza Tabrizi, paper and opaque water colours. 32.5 x 21 cm, Iran, 1271/1854–1855. Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, Inv. No. sxm/ag 2022.

Urbanity

Postcards, Hotels, and Hospitable Minorities: Armenian and Parsi Urbanity Networking a British Empire

by Talinn Grigor

In his watershed, The Mediterranean (1949), Fernand Braudel names the Armenians and the Parsis of the early and high modern periods as two old and classic examples of “civilizations of the diaspora type.” This talk aims to map a network of minoritarian architectural patronage by expanding Sussan Babaie’s concepts of Safavid-era “Perso-Shiʿa conviviality,” “politics of generosity,” and “the mercantile effect” into the British imperial strategies of the nineteenth century. The most striking urban expression of this generosity politics manifested in Armenian- and Parsi-owned residential mansions that paralleled a chain of Armenian- and Parsi-owned and -managed luxury hotels. In 1884, the four Sarkies Brothers from New Julfa “dominated the hospitality trade in the East” with the establishment of the Eastern & Oriental Hotel (E&O) ensembles. The staggering success of the Raffles Hotel (1887) in Singapore was owed to Tigran Sarkies, who moved there and formed the “oldest and most iconic hotel” in the country. Tigran then joined his brother, Aviet, in 1895 to acquire from John Darwood and relaunch the Strand Hotel (1901) in Rangoon, Myanmar. The scale of Sarkis Brother’s hotel in Penang, Singapore, and Rangoon was paralleled by Jamsetji Nusservanji Tata’s neoclassical Esplanade House in Bombay (1887), outdone by the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel (1903). The partnership between Parsi Sir Hormusjee Nowrojee Mody and Armenian Sir Catchick Paul Chater in Hong Kong resulted in megaprojects such as the Kowloon Development and Praya Reclamation, starting in the 1860s, that transformed the city’s urban fabric.

Performativity

Khmer Royal and Noble Chedey (stupas) as Markers of Family Lineage and Politics at the Time of Shifting Political Regimes

by Boreth Ly and Suppya Hélène Nut

This paper stems from a “miscommunication” that took place in 2023. It involved the monks at Wat Botum Vaddey, a Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, and a construction company. The conflict led to the near-destruction of a chedey, an edifice housing ancestral remains (bones and ashes). This chedey, built in 1900, is made of bricks and plaster and decorated with bencharong ceramic flowers. This vandalistic act draws our focus to the very few other surviving 19^th-century chedeys belonging to the Royal and noble families. Our paper investigates how Siamese, French and Chinese influences shaped the decoration found on these chedeys and how a distinctively Khmer style of chedey evolved. The paper addresses three central ideas. First, it seeks to understand the Buddhist concepts embodied by the decorative elements embedded in these mortuary buildings. Second, it considers performances of court dances in front of the Royal chedeys as offerings to ancestors for rain and protection, linking dance ritual to the concept of floral offerings and remembrance. Third, it addresses how the destruction of some of these chedeys located at sites affiliated with the old regimes was followed by the construction of newer, bigger chedeys for families of the current political regime is an act of erasure of memory. In conclusion, we argue that these sites are potent symbols of memory, social class, dynasty, and power that are contested by shifting political regimes.

Image: Almost-Destroyed Chedey dated 1900 located at Wat Botum Vaddey, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Circulation and Materiality

(Mis)Translating James Gibbs: Neoclassical Mosques and the Architecture of a Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean World

by Sugata Ray

Nineteenth-century neoclassical mosques in the Indian Ocean world invite us to rethink creative (mis)translation not only as a productive site of art historical analysis, but also as a means of engaging the entangled histories and connected topographies that constituted oceanic space. In the early nineteenth century, Muslim merchants in port cities such as Singapore, Calcutta, and Tarim adapted the architectural language of British colonial churches—ultimately derived from James Gibbs’s neoclassical St Martin-in-the-Fields in London—to develop a novel mosque typology. Departing sharply from the region’s early modern Islamic architectural traditions, these acts of creative translation unsettled both the imperial rhetoric that distinguished the modern West from its Others through architectural difference and the discourses of power that underwrote British colonial architecture across the empire. Revisiting neoclassical mosques such as Hajjah Fatimah Mosque in Singapore, Ghulam Muhammad’s Mosque in Calcutta, and al-Mihdar Mosque in Tarim, this talk foregrounds the dense architectural matrix through which Muslim cosmopolitanisms in the Indian Ocean world were imagined, negotiated, and built.

Image: Ghulam Muhammad’s mosque, Calcutta, 1835.

On Heroic Maps: Imagining ‘China’ in Premodern Geo-bodies and Modern Historiography

by Stephen Whiteman

On opposite sides of a twelfth-century stele appear two of the most famous maps in Chinese history, the Tracks of Yu 禹跡圖 and the Map of Chinese and Foreigners 華夷圖. The two have different origins and employ very different visual and technical vocabularies in depicting ‘China’. As such, their pairing by an unknown official in the early years of the Jin state (1115–1234), when the future of ‘China’ as both unified polity and coherent concept was much in doubt, has given the maps an almost heroic status in the historiography of Chinese cartography. Beginning with this famous stone, my talk explores the geographical imagination of ‘China’ in premodern maps and modern historiography, considering efforts in both Asia and Europe to define Chinese society and civilization through its technical accomplishments. In so doing, I reflect on the role of canons and icons in the construction of national histories and the potential of cultural history for articulating alternative narratives.