British photographer Samuel Bourne is celebrated for both his technical skills as well as his ‘adventurous outlook in seeking out suitably picturesque views to record’. Much of his successful commercial career was forged in India through photographs made during his extensive travels across the subcontinent, including the expeditions into the Himalayas – Cheenee-Sutlej River area and Spiti in 1863, Cashmere (Kashmir) in 1864, and to the Higher Himalayas in 1866.
His photos, considered as ‘one of the earliest views of India’ have been extensively chronicled, researched, exhibited for over a century and continue to circulate widely online. Yet photos and narratives from his most ‘ambitious travels’ across the Himalayas, hold untold stories – of the local guides, knowledge systems, and supplies- that enabled him to explore these landscapes and frame the views that would go on to create a colonial narrative of the mountains.

‘Great snowy peak south of the Hamta Pass’, 1866, Samuel Bourne, Cambridge University Library, CC BY-NC 4.0.

A large number of Bourne’s photographs – compiled in three albums – are currently held at the Cambridge University Library. Amidst photographs of Calcutta, Lucknow, Benaras, Amritsar, and Kashmir, are some of the earliest images of the Himalayas. These albums belong to the colonial endeavour of recording India for commercial purposes as well as for audiences back in Britain.

‘In the 19th century, the Himalayas became a key focus for the British Empire’

View from the Kunzam Pass, – elevation 14,931 feet 1866, Samuel Bourne, Cambridge University Library, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Initially it was commercial ambitions that drove British interest in the Himalayas – especially in the Western Himalayan region. But when the mountains proved to be of limited economic value, the discourse shifted towards their role as the ‘natural’ border or strategic frontiers in the rivalry with Russia over territorial control of Central Asia (known as the Great Game). It became a need of the hour for the colonial authorities to document the Himalayan landscape and its features, for exerting control through knowledge. The Himalayas thus became a zone of activity: traversed by explorers, surveyors, photographers gathering and producing knowledge (maps, photographs and travelogues).

Within this field of colonial activity, Bourne, unlike other photographers of the time, worked independently with no formal links to colonial institutions. Even then, his work depended heavily on institutional networks, local knowledge and resources.

Bourne’s Himalayan journey coincided with the Empire’s efforts to map and survey the Himalayas and Tibetan area as well as scientific explorations.

During his expeditions, Bourne leaned on the knowledge formalised by institutions like the Survey of India; he frequently encountered and interacted with people involved in the process. Near Cheenee (now known as Kalpa), he met a surveyor who advised him to head west towards Spiti to further explore the ‘mighty Himalayas’.

Bourne also ‘relied entirely’ on a small pocket route map published by Captain Thomas George Montgomerie (1830-1878) of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India during the second expedition. He navigated the journey from Chumba (Chamba) to Cashmere (Kashmir), relying on a little route map compiled by Montgomerie.

Montgomerie himself, depended heavily on local surveyors. 1863 onwards, he increasingly employed Indian ‘pundits’ trained in cartographical knowledge, to explore regions (like Tibet) which were beyond European reach. Between 1774-1904, Abdul Mejid, Nain Singh Rawat, Sarat Chandra Das, Kinthup disguised as pilgrims – traversed the Himalayas, surveying and producing a detailed survey of the landscape.

Local knowledge was also vital for scientific exploration.

During the second expedition, Bourne was accompanied by Dr. George Rankin Playfair (1816–1881), continuing geological and naturalist work in the Himalayas. In Kibber, a region noted for its geological features, Bourne and Playfair initially failed to locate fossils, which locals then provided – demonstrating the essential, often unacknowledged, expertise of indigenous people in enabling both scientific and photographic endeavours.

Besides the crucial contribution of indigenous knowledge, Bourne’s Himalayan expedition also relied heavily on local labour.

‘View from the Thibet [Tibet] road at Pangi’, 1866, Samuel Bourne, Cambridge University Library, CC BY-NC 4.0

A retinue of around thirty ‘coolies’ (porters) accompanied Bourne, and carried his equipment and provisions across the terrain. Yet, in his narratives, not only are they unacknowledged, but also invisibilised. Bourne describes the porters’ ability to navigate the terrain as a ‘mystery’; he goes on to invisibilise their specialised skill, by labelling it as them being ‘accustomed to it’. 

Behind the ‘peaceful’ pursuit of Bourne’s Himalayan photographs lay coercion and violence

There remains a question whether all people whom Bourne refers to as ‘coolies’ were porters by profession. His narrative, if read critically, gives an account of marginalised people who were forced to join him as ‘coolies’ by village headmen for profiteering. On his journey from Dhurmsala (Dharmasala) to Dalhousie during his trip to Kashmir, he describes how he used physical violence on the ‘coolies’ who had left his equipment by the road and escaped to their houses. 

During Bourne’s second journey in the Himalayas, in Nugger (Naggar, currently in Himachal Pradesh), his coolies ‘mutinied’. He hit the coolies who refused to go further in the journey with a stick to exert his “seasonable sovereignty [which] had a good effect”, forcing them to continue with him through the difficult terrain carrying his equipment and load (while he went empty-handed).

Violence was not always physical, but also appeared through the disruption of local commerce and exchange. During his journey in this region, Bourne records the ‘difficulty’ he faced in obtaining food supplies for his coolies, and coerced villagers to part with their provisions in exchange for money. His journey altered the social relations and exchanges in his way by buying the produce from locals, which was meant for their consumption and survival in the harsh conditions. 

As Sandeep Banerjee points out, it was the:

singular importance of the labor of the colonized, as in the case of Bourne’s coolies, [and inhabitants who provide him with supplies, which was] the enabling feature for what is usually remarked upon as colonial forays into the Himalaya for their survey, mapping, exploration or photography.

The Bourne-Aesthetic : spectacle, hierarchy, and the picturesque.

It was after his first Himalayan expedition, that Bourne consolidated his career by establishing the firm ‘Howard, Bourne & Shepherd’ in December of 1863. It soon became one of the most prominent and longest-running photographic studios in India, until its recent closure in 2016. Apart from being a photographer, he was an excellent businessman, and carefully catered to imperialist curiosities through his advertising and narratives. Even as his business grew, Bourne continued to pursue the Himalayas. His narratives can be understood by what anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn calls ‘observational/travel modality’.

Bourne employed a ‘repertoire of images and typifications that determined what was significant to the European eye’.

His reference to sati (suttee) memorials

During his second expedition to Kashmir, Bourne visited the temples at Byjnath (now Baijnath, a town in Himachal Pradesh). On his way to Byjnath, two miles from Kangra, he came across ‘brick tombs’, which he describes as ‘monuments of the suttees’. Aligning to the typifications, Bourne viewed these as visual markers of ‘native custom’, while commenting on the practice’s halt by the colonial government.

The magnificent trunks and foliage of the pipul tree, with these relics of sutteeism, furnished me with an interesting picture.

The description of the temple carvings and ceremonies at Baijnath

Bourne’s exchange with the priest of the temple on the “absurdity of all his devotion”, and his remark on the “grossness of his [own] belief”, fed on contemporary evangelist accounts of ‘absurd’ and ‘gross’ oriental beliefs.

In Chamba, Bourne’s descriptions of the ruler’s pageantry and his ‘glitter and outward show’ fed to Victorian perceptions of India.

Bourne’s narrative about the Chamba rulers’ arrival with “glittering but motley train of followers”, and his dismissal of the Maharaja of Kashmir’s spiritual beliefs further fed into Victorian conceptions of Oriental exoticism. Such narratives portrayed indigenous rulers as superstitious and vain – as figures of spectacle rather than intellect.

The Oriental Landscaping of Kashmir

For Victorian audiences, Thomas Moore’s poem Lalla Rookh (1817) had already cast Kashmir as a fantastical landscape of beauty and sensuality, moulding the perceptions and ideas of later artists and photographs who visited. Bourne’s photographs, taken in 1864, framed the valley through the romantic imagery of the poem and offered a visual counterpart to it, making the mountains and valleys appear both “exotic” and accessible. By 1866, the firm had nearly 600 views of Kashmir, more than one third of the total 1,500 photographs in their catalogue.

Bourne frequently quoted Moore in his narrative, and described Kashmir as a “terrestrial paradise”, whose “beauty which fame had ascribed to it is not altogether a myth”. He offers a sensualised picture of ‘nautch girls’ with colourful skirts and decked with jewellery (while also narrating his personal dissatisfaction with their performance and appearance, which were “miserably ugly”).

Srinuggur, 1864: Group of Kashmiri Women

In his Himalayan landscapes, Bourne used ‘historically specific aesthetic principles’, such as the ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’ to capture attention – which occupied a significant place in Victorian imagination.

In July 1866, he set out on what he called his most ambitious venture into the “Higher Himalayas.” Here, the images shifted from the ornamental valleys of Kashmir to the forbidding peaks and glaciers that embodied Victorian ideas of the sublime.

Capturing the Himalayan ‘picturesque’: Reading Bourne’s photos

During his narrative of Kashmir, Bourne had revealed his intention to visit the ‘district where the Ganges and Jumna have their source’ in the summer of 1866, to capture the ‘sublimest scenery of the world’.

‘The Ganges Valley, from the Village of Suki, evening 1865, Samuel Bourne, Cambridge University Library, CC BY-NC 4.0. Bourne calls the Gangotri a “holy and not altogether unpicturesque object”.

The idea of the picturesque, somewhere between the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’, makes the unknown appear as knowable, and gives the viewer a visual of what is ‘foreign’. Bourne attempted to achieve by alluding to the familiar Alpine landscapes, trekking and photography in his narratives.

A close look at Bourne’s photographs of the Himalayas, reveals an erased human presence; in some photos, when human figures appear, they are so minimal that they dissolve into the composition. The minimised human figures became a scale to emphasise the vastness of the Himalayan landscape.

The Manirung Pass, elevation 18,600 ft 1866, Samuel Bourne, Cambridge University Library, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Bourne’s aesthetic choice of separating the landscape from its inhabitants echoed the imperial propagation of ‘India’ : an untraversed and uninhabited land, that required colonial control.

Throughout his narrative on the Himalayas, Bourne described the region as ‘untrodden’, ‘little-known’ and ‘inhabitable’.

However, this narrative overlooks and obscures the centuries of pilgrimage and trade routes that have interwoven the landscape, as well as the lives of peripatetic individuals such as travelling ascetics like Pran Puri, merchants like Khwajah Ahmed Ali who navigated the complex lines of trade, intermediation and espionage, guides like Purangir Gosain, who led George Bogle in the first diplomatic mission to Tibet in 1774, and later headed the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Bhot Bagan, Howrah. Gosains and Kashmiris had maintained extensive networks of connection in the Himalayas for pilgrimage and commercial exchanges, and acted as guides and agents.

Bourne, by reducing the locals simply as wage labourers or coolies in his narrative, and by rendering them microscopic in his photographs, denies not only their existence, but also their historic agency and relationship with the landscape.

Just a decade before Bourne’s arrival, in 1857, a Tibetan lama’s journey from Lhasa came to an abrupt halt at Kullu due to the Indian Uprising. Here he was commissioned to create detailed maps of Tibet, a region inaccessible to Europeans. These maps provide ethnographic and socio-religious insights and are an extensive source of indigenous information and visualisation about Tibet and Western Himalayas: trade and pilgrimage routes, monasteries and their architecture, and the topography of the region. In 2016, Diana Lange uncovered that William Edmund Hay (1805-1879), the British Assistant Commissioner of Kullu commissioned the lama¹. Later, Thomas Alexander Wise (1802-1889), a Scottish polymath and collector who served in the Indian Medical Service in Bengal, acquired these maps.

Today, the six large picture maps, accompanied with 28 related drawings and 24 sheets of explanatory notes are part of the British Library’s Wise Collection.

These maps and the bits of information we get from a close reading of the colonial archive, illustrate a picture that directly contradicts Bourne’s photographs and narrative. Bourne presents the Himalayas as a landscape largely untouched, and untraversed; he denies the local knowledge, labor, and expertise which shaped and documented the terrain long before his arrival. Reading Bourne’s images and narratives alongside such sources lets us recover the local agency that enabled his journeys, that his celebrated photographs have obscured.

This article is part of our Open Knowledge series (2025), supported by Wikimedia UK.