Kamalnayan Bajaj Special Exhibitions Gallery

The Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, in collaboration with DAG, presents a major exhibition- Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments, 1855-1920, exploring the role of photography in shaping understandings of India’s past. Drawing from DAG’s significant archive of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs of Indian monuments, the exhibition examines the intertwined histories of photography, archaeology, field surveys and the production of historical knowledge in colonial India. The museum's collection includes rare photographs of the city of Mumbai from the late 19th-early 20th century which will also be on view in the Origins of Mumbai gallery.

Curated by Dr Sudeshna Guha, former Curatorial Manager and Research Associate of the photographic collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider photographs not simply as objective records of the past, but as complex visual artefacts shaped by the conditions of their production, circulation, collection and interpretation.

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Bringing together photographs produced between 1855 and 1920, Histories in the Making traces the emergence of photography alongside the surveying and documentation of India’s ancient monuments. The exhibition explores how photographic technologies transformed the ways in which India’s architectural heritage was recorded and understood, while also revealing how photographs participated in broader colonial projects of knowledge-making.

At the same time, it demonstrates that photographic meaning was never fixed; changes in technology, methods of reproduction, archival practices and modes of circulation continually reshaped how these images were seen and understood. The exhibition also foregrounds the contributions of Indian photographers, whose work complicates conventional understandings of photography’s role within colonial visual culture. Alongside internationally recognised figures such as Lala Deen Dayal and Narayan Vinayak Virkar, Histories in the Making introduces visitors to lesser-known practitioners whose photographs reveal alternative perspectives and previously overlooked engagements with dominant colonial narratives.