| Throughout the history of human wars, the war-chronicler has found himself amongst the rear-guard of any action, no better than a straggler. Any record we may have today of battles fought (whether won or lost) has been culled from the belated, inevitably subjective recollections of the survivors, tinctured by victory or by defeat. To a great extent, the nineteenth century changed all that, for during that unusually turbulent period, which began with the Napoleonic Wars and ended with the Boer War, there seemed hardly any continent left on the globe that had not witnessed a conflict of some sort or the other. |
| Gradually, as the art of war became more and more mechanical, so did the artillery of the war-illustrator. One of the most prolific, if not famous of them, was William Simpson, a skilled British watercolorist whose sketches from the battlefields of the Crimea brought home to his compatriots the haunting, crowded images of a distant war. Because there was no equipment invented at the time to reproduce Simpson’s sketches, they were converted into woodcut engravings and then used as illustrations in pictorial new-journals like the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. By the time such equipment did come into use, the newer art of photography had replaced the war-illustrator’s brush, and as one did not need to be an artist to take a picture, it is not surprising to discover that many a professional soldier revealed a latent talent for photography and emerged as a war-photographer. |
| The first such photographer to work in northern India was Dr. John McCosh who in 1848 took some precious calotypes of Lahore’s monuments and personalities involved in the Multan campaign. Many others followed, but perhaps the most significant of them (certainly the least acknowledged) were two soldiers – William Baker and his partner John Burke. William Baker, an Irishman and the senior of the two, arrived in India in 1850 and after a brief career in the army, opted out nine years later, advertising himself in his civilian persona in Peshawar as a ‘Photographist’. His intrepidness was tempered by an awareness that while art might be able to imitate life, it could not support it, and therefore he felt the need to conduct a parallel business as a ‘Commission & House Agent.’ It is perhaps an indication of his growing reputation that the firm he founded ‘W. Baker & Co.’ was in the end described by his surviving partner John Burke as ‘Photo Artiste.’ |
| The career of John Burke began with a stint as an apothecary in the Royal Artillery. He left dispensing to join Baker’s fledgling business. Over the years, Baker and Burke combined their efforts, using the trapezium of Peshawar, Murree, Lahore and Multan as the area of their presence, and by the mid 1860s, competing against such established firms as Bourne and Shepherd. Burke, in particular, assisted H.H. Cole of the nascent Archaeological Survey of India to document pictorially many of the ancient and deteriorating monuments. As their expertise increased, their repertoire also expanded and they were able to offer their clients an increasingly wider range of subjects to choose from their catalogues, the catalogue of 1872 in particular now regarded as a high-watermark of their professional standing. |
| In 1885, the firm opened a branch in Lahore and it was in Lahore that John Burke died at the end of the nineteenth century, on 27 May 1900. He was buried in the Catholic cemetery near Taxali Gate. Today, there is no trace either of the massive Taxali Gate or of John Burke’s tombstone. |
| In a sense, he no longer needs one. Mr. Omar Khan’s meticulously researched reconstruction of his life and career and that of his senior partner William Baker is the most apposite monument to their skill, talent and enterprise. That the photographs they took provide us today with a precious pictorial chronicle of the areas and the cities that lie between Kashmir and Kabul - two-flashpoints once again - imbue this brilliantly structured and invaluable book with an added and timely relevance. |
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