Photographs and the Method of Memory: Reflections from the Field
By Prajaktha Gurung
As I sit beside 85-year-old Hemlata Dewan, she adjusts her shawl, settling herself in for our conversation. As promised, she has brought two photographs in her bag. That is all she has saved. She hands them over to me. Among them is a studio portrait—a young woman in a saree, posed carefully against a painted backdrop, decades before I would sit across from her and ask what she remembers.
When I began my research, my objective was to trace the changes in Darjeeling through the eyes of older residents. I wanted to study photographs as a second cross-referencing layer of memory, running alongside the spoken one. As I progressed, photographs became important not just as data but also as a method for studying these memories.
Hemlata, like many others, hands me her studio portrait, an image from her personal archive. But the photograph speaks to a world beyond her individual experience. It evokes relationships with other people and places, and offers a glimpse into the wider social histories of which her life is a part.
According to my respondents, photography in mid-20th-century Darjeeling was largely confined to formal studio settings, where subjects posed against painted backdrops. Preparing for such portraits was a deliberate and often celebratory process, with individuals wearing their finest clothes. Many recall several prominent studios of the time including Das Studio, Indra Studio and Chandrakala Studio.
Photographs were exchanged among friends and relatives and kept as cherished keepsakes. Today, people often dress up for an occasion and photographs document the event; in mid-20th-century Darjeeling, this logic was often reversed. Having one’s photograph taken was itself a moment significant enough to warrant preparation and formality. Over time, the wider availability of portable colour film cameras led to the decline of this practice, as photography slowly became more casual and integrated into everyday life.
Nima Sherpa remembers having his portrait taken at 16. “I lied that I was 18, but actually in this portrait I am 16. Look at how the size of these clothes is big for me,” he chuckles. Enlisting in the British Army required recruits to be at least 18. We go through other photographs in his three thick spiral-bound albums. Nima Sherpa has clearly taken care to preserve them. He can name most of the people in the photographs and recall the occasions on which they were taken, often down to the precise year. He steers the conversation beautifully, weaving each photograph into the experiences and memories he shares.
Elsewhere, however, photographs behave very differently. In a cafe in Kalimpong, a member of the Confluence Collective is helping me. We look through photographs on a laptop to find those suitable for my research. More than once, we sit with a photograph that no one in the room is able to talk about. The people who could have named its subjects are gone, and the photograph sits there, searching for someone to complete it. We try to work out the location and the year, but beyond a few details, the photograph yields little. It has depth. It holds a memory. But it also seems out of our reach. A photograph, I begin to realise, does not preserve memory automatically. It preserves the possibility of memory, for as long as someone remains who can activate it.
This also raises a host of other questions for me. When we talk of memories as history, whose history am I collecting? Whose experiences are amplified simply because they happened to be photographed, and whose are forgotten because they weren’t? Every photograph handed to me has already passed through a series of choices. Someone, at some point, decided that this moment was worth keeping, while countless others were not. Someone decided that this person, this occasion, mattered; that this particular photograph should be preserved, or given to someone else. Decades later, someone decided that it was worth showing to me. And now I make another choice: which of these photographs will become part of the story I wish to tell. What reaches the writer, and eventually the reader, is what has survived a succession of decisions about what was worth remembering.
Two respondents narrate their experiences of the tea estates differently. One offers a deeply personal account of the 1986 agitation, speaking of his home, his family and his own experiences. The other speaks more impersonally, of business, the economy and the climate, choosing to keep his personal life more or less out of the account. How much one chooses to tell is a choice. A porter I spoke to had little to say about the town beyond his own village, where he had lived all his life, but much to say about himself and his experiences there. He had almost no photographs to show me. A seasoned traveller did not hold back and strained his head, thinking of everything he could possibly recall.
Some memories, however, seem to have spread their roots through the years, etching themselves into the minds of more than one person. These memories assert their dominance and truth through their overlaps, their intersections and their repeated telling.
B.B Gurung recalls one such account, of a man named Geoffrey Johnston. Johnston, the owner of Rungmook Tea Estate during the 1960s and ’70s, was an Englishman who was killed during unrest in the tea gardens. “He used to wear this felt (cowboy) hat and rode a bike, too. He was the only one with a bike in our village at the time, the only one we had ever seen, in fact. We used to come out of our houses to see the sight of him on his bike. He also drove a Land Rover 2857 among his many other cars,” he recounts.
B.B Gurung’s account of Johnston comes from someone who encountered him as the saheb of the estate, far removed from his reality—a white man with immense resources and privilege. Johnston, however, did struggle financially, as those close to him attest. J.P Gurung is a second-generation tea planter in Darjeeling, a man of education and good standing. His account of Johnston is more personal, that of a colleague. He talks of Johnston’s demeanour, his personal life and his Mercedes WGX 3406. Both respondents remember Johnston’s tragic fate, and both still recall a number plate with strange precision, one the Land Rover’s and the other the Mercedes’.
Memories began to acquire depth when they encountered one another—when a story told by one person echoed something I had heard elsewhere, or when a photograph confirmed a detail in an oral account. These overlaps allowed Darjeeling’s contours to emerge.
I began this research thinking of memory as something people have and photographs record. I now think of it as something spread across many points—a person, their material belongings, their photographs, the person who took the portrait and the neighbour who was also there.
Hemlata’s studio portrait is right in front of me. “You look very beautiful here,” I tell her. She beams. I can tell she thinks so, too. On its own, the photograph is a portrait of a young woman. Beside her voice, it becomes a memory. Oral history and photography, I now think, are not just two sources but partners in a single race against time, each keeping the other from falling silent.
Prajaktha Gurung is a researcher and visual artist from Darjeeling. She holds a master's degree in Society and Culture from IIT Gandhinagar, where her research focused on Anthropology. Her visual work revolves around memory, spaces and women. Her academic research interests, still evolving, lie in gender, technology and society. In her free time, you can find her picking up various new interests to experiment with. Her current obsession is running a 5k under 25 minutes.
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