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that Nawab Khwaja Yusuf Jaan, a member of this family, also patronized
photography. Nawabzada Khwaja Afzal, Khwaja Solayman Kader, Khwaja Azmal,
Khwaja Zahir, Khwaja Latifullah and Khwaja Masukullah left their signature of
creativity as amateur photographers. 19
2.2 The Early Pioneers
Englishman Alexander Forbes was the editor of Dhaka News (1856), the first weekly
of Dhaka. He also did some photography in Dhaka as part of his job as a journalist.
Nawab Sir Khwaja Ahsanullah (1846-1901) of Dhaka played a vital role in furthering
photography in British India. He was born at a time when photography began in
Kolkata. Acquaintance with the British helped him and his family to come into contact
with cameras at the initial stage and he also mastered the techniques of photography.
However, no photograph taken by him is available anymore. Patronized by him, a
famous German photographer named Fritz Kapp living in Kolkata took many photos
of Dhaka city and the Nawab family. These photographs are of great historical value
today. The most important role Nawab Khwaja Ahsanullah played as a photographer
is in patronizing organizations. He was the active director and also a member of
Kolkata-centered ‘Photographic Society or India’, established in the 1980s.
Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri (1869-1915), a son of the Chaudhuri family of the
Masua village of Kishoreganj, Mymensingh, lived in Kolkata. He started photography
in his college years. He took up photography as a profession in the 1980s. His biggest
contributions in the history of photography are development of the half-tone technique
and reflections on the aesthetics of photography. He excelled in printing photographs
using red half-tone blocks. He discovered processes of creating different types of
diaphragms, invented the re-screen adjustment machine and diotype-reprint technique.
He set up a block-making company named U.K. Roy and Sons Company in Kolkata.
Articles written by him on matters of photography were appreciated both at home and
abroad. His brother Kuladaranjan Ray and son Sukumar Ray also made worthy
contributions in the history of photography in Bengal. Sukumar Ray (1887-1923),
20
son of Upendrakishore Ray was a poet, actor, singer and editor (Sandesh). He was also
renowned as a skilled photographer. His photographs were published in newspapers of
Britain when he was a teenager and he was also awarded for his photographs. He was
the second Indian member (1912) of London’s Royal Photographic Society. There are
many photographs of Rabindranath Tagore among the important photos he took. 21
Nilmadhab De was born in Kolkata in the first half of the 19th century. After working
as a photographer in Nepal, he set up a studio named ‘The Bengal Photographers’ in
Kolkata in 1862. According to some experts, it is the first photography studio by a
Bengali. Samarendra Chandra Deb Barman (1862-1935), son of Maharaja Birchandra
Manikya of Tripura was sincere, successful and unique in his photographic endeavors
in undivided British Bengal. He was also a theoretician in photographic matters.
Besides getting four medals in Britain in an exhibition for photographs printed on