Sometime in 1974 or ‘75, Robert Skelton, curator of the India section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, reached out to a freshly-minted PhD by the name of George Michell with a request to take on an enormous, unfinished project. David McCutchion, at the time of his untimely death, had left behind several thousand photographs of the brick temples of Bengal, copious notes, and footsteps that were almost impossible to follow. While several articles had come out in his lifetime, there was a great deal still to be made of his work. Michell’s doctoral research was in Indian architectural history but he was a complete newcomer to Bengal’s architectural landscape. Despite initial hesitations, he decided to test the waters. During one of his trips to India, Michell visited Kalna, Bishnupur and a few other places that were famous for their temples. He was enchanted not only by the structures he was supposed to study but by the Bengal countryside as well. With Skelton’s encouragement, Michell agreed to take on the project and the archive of David McCutchion was soon transported—temporarily—to his house in Islington, then a suburb in north London.
Michell recalls:
I spent months and months just sorting everything out. And you must know that David was not only extremely poor, because he lived on a teacher’s salary at Jadavpur, but he didn’t mix at all with the British expat community. He wasn’t involved in that sort of life. He was, as you know, a Bengali speaker. He was friendly with writers and filmmakers. And he was very much part of the local intellectual, Calcutta world. He lived in a sort of complete austerity…And all the pictures, the photographs, were plated, put into envelopes, which were cut up from discarded pieces of paper and glued together. Can you imagine he couldn’t even afford to buy new paper envelopes?
After the archive was put in order, Michell started reading everything McCutchion had written—and wondering, if he were continuing with his work, what would he have written? Travelling to Calcutta, Michell met the people whom McCutchion had worked with, people who knew him, thought like him—among them Amiya Kumar Bandyopadhyay and Hitesranjan Sanyal. He encountered the moving obituary Satyajit Ray had written for McCutchion and went to meet him–sometime around 1978 or ‘79. Ray agreed readily to let him use it as a preface to the book. Although the book was gradually taking shape in his mind, following McCutchion’s trail was another matter entirely, for he had left no map.
When I went to the archive in Calcutta to look at maps, to find where these villages were…there was no indication where all these places were, except the district and the Taluks. The National Library…has a map section. So, I walked in there. And I said, you know, my name is and I need blah, blah. And they said, ‘It’s funny, you know, last week, we had somebody else come in looking for maps for temples.’ I said, ‘That can’t be true. Nobody’s interested in the subject!’ So that’s how I got to meet Shambu Mitra, who lived on the other side of the river.
With Mitra’s help, Michell started finding his way around the Bengal countryside, often encountering challenges owing to language barriers. At times, they would be frustrated by local guides, who were unable to point in the direction of specific temples they were searching for and take them instead to the nearest, popular one. Sometimes they would have to rely on their ingenuity to enter the sacred grounds.
I was traveling with a friend, Erna. She had come along on the understanding that we would go on local buses and stay in third-class hotels. She was marvelous. At one temple, I’m trying to remember where it was, there was a gate that was sort of locked. I said, ‘You go to the other side of the street, so all the village children and everybody else will cluster around you.’
With the crowd distracted by a foreigner in distress, Michell managed to get in—the lock was only for show—and get the measurements he needed.
The Bengal chapter of Michell’s research would draw to a close after he completed his research on the book in the early1980s. He became involved with a project in Hampi, Karnataka.
What sets apart George Michell’s photograph archive is that it is not a replication of what David McCutchion set out to capture through his lens. There are a few gaps that he needed to fill, but otherwise, he was on McCutchion’s trail, discovering a landscape unfamiliar to him, on his own terms. Michell photographs not only the religious architecture or tombs, but also documents all that struck him as remarkable. Political graffiti from the time make cameo appearances, for instance, as do other remarkable structures, like the Mohan Cinema in Berhampore. The riverine and rural landscape that drew Michell to the project in the first place, feature prominently in his photographic chronicle, offering a context that disappears from other archives more focused on religious architecture.
Michell finds it strange to be referred to as a photographer and claims that his photographs are a far cry from the precision McCutchion aspired for. He did not have the perspective correcting equipment, for instance, and ventured with a basic camera, which he could lay his hands on easily. Unlike McCutchion, who would return to the same site numerous times to get a specific angle or light, Michell had to travel swiftly, moving from village to village and trying to work out where he would spend the night.
The negatives were taken back to England, he recalls, where they were developed and carefully organized in separate boxes, the locations jotted in pencil. In 2022, Michell gave his collection to Amit Guha—a formidable scholar of Bengal’s religious architecture himself—with the gracious permission to share them on the Creative Commons. Wikimedia’s generous funding has enabled the digitization of this photograph archive, along with metadata creation and uploading. The research was conducted at the CSSSC by Atmajit Mukherjee, Sumantra Baral, and Debraj Ghatak.
Based on an interview with George Michell in November 2023 by Amit Guha, Kamalika Mukherjee, Sujaan Mukherjee, Atmajit Mukherjee, Sumantra Baral, and Debraj Ghatak.
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