Master prints
Yet another art fair gets off the ground in the Capital - this one with Raja Deen Dayal as its USP
Great artists do not die, their fame and market value only go up. So it has been with Raja Deen Dayal, the 19th-century photographer who pioneered the medium in India and left an exquisite visual record of his times, especially the pomp and splendour of Indian princes, their magnificent attire and jewels, grand palaces and lavish life-styles. To be sure, Deen Dayal’s reputation was made in his lifetime, with royal warrants from the Nizam of Hyderabad and Queen Victoria.
For collectors looking to acquire a Deen Dayal, there’s a steady trickle of old prints at international and domestic auctions with prices in the range of Rs 2-3 lakh. But these are generally few and far between. They can now, however, get a Deen Dayal at Delhi’s United Art Fair which will be held at Pragati Maidan between September 27 and 30.
UAF will be the capital’s second art fair after the successful India Art Fair which has been around for five years now. With over 600 artists, a majority of them emerging ones from all over the country, prices starting at Rs 15,000, and the support of the ministry of culture, UAF promises to be different. At any rate, its format is new and unusual. Unlike other art fairs where galleries rent space and showcase artists they represent, at UAF —a venture of Annurag Sharma of art shipping firm United Art Logistics — it is the artists who will be participating directly. They’ve, of course, had to clear a screening process by contemporary art curator Johnny ML and other experts but they haven’t had to pay anything to take part (a part of the sale proceeds will, however, go to the organisers). More important, visitors too will get free entry to the fair.
Deen Dayal will be the USP of the fair. There’ll be around 30-40 images on offer, each in editions of 20 to 25 prints, with an authentication certificate printed at the back, says Priya Singhal, who is bringing the works. The images cover the gamut of subjects and interests that the legend turned his bulky lens (they were specially made and large enough to serve as locks on a treasury, according to one writer) on — Writers Building in Calcutta, Deeg Palace near Bharatpur and the Charminar in Hyderabad; portraits of Fateh Singh Rao Gaekwad of Baroda and Raghubir Singh of Bundi; the nizam of Hyderabad, Mahboob Ali Pasha, leading a procession of Indian princes at the Delhi Durbar, Lord and Lady Curzon with a kill and so on. There’s also a portrait of the photographer himself generally attributed to his son Dharam Chand. The prints are priced in the range of Rs 1.25-Rs 3.5 lakh, depending on size and edition number.
Singhal is a member of the sixth generation of Deen Dayal’s family. She traces her lineage to Hukum Chand, the son of Gyan Chand, Deen Dayal’s son (he had another son, Dharam Chand, who died in his father’s lifetime). Singhal’s father, Naresh Chand, is the legal title holder of the Deen Dayal Estate she says. The family has around 1,000 glass plate negatives which have now been scanned and stored on a CD. Glass plate negatives were used by early photographers, Deen Dayal among them, who coated them with photo-sensitive chemicals and then exposed them while they were still wet to the image they wanted to record. “These are very difficult to preserve and we did not want to take any chances with them,” says Singhal.
It was this problem of preservation that had prompted Ami Chand, another grandson of Deen Dayal, and his daughter Hemlata Jain to leave their collection of 3,000 glass plate negatives to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Delhi in the early 1980s. That collection forms part of the permanent display at IGNCA now and also formed the core of a large three-month retrospective show of the artist that was mounted last year.