Dynastic History|Vitthala Temple, Hampi — Photographed in 1856, Printed in 1910

Colonel Alexander John Greenlaw, stationed at Bellary, carried a camera through the ruins of Vijayanagara in the season of 1855–56. He worked with waxed-paper negatives — the calotype process — and made the first extensive photographic record of the abandoned capital: more than sixty views, among them the stone chariot in the Vitthala complex, its wheels on the ground, the eastern gopura standing behind it and the carved hall to one side.

None of the prints Greenlaw pulled at the time is known to survive. What exists is a set made in 1910, when his negatives were lent to the Victoria and Albert Museum by a Mrs Armitage of East Sheen and printed specially for the collection. The museum holds sixty-one of them, and they are the earliest extant photographs of the city. A further set was printed in 1983 and distributed, reaching the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Alkazi Foundation among others; the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru dates the coming to light of Greenlaw's coverage to that decade, and George Michell has written on it since.

The plates matter for what they are not. Vijayanagara was abandoned after 1565 and surveyed for the East India Company by Colin Mackenzie around 1800, and the nineteenth-century writers who followed him assigned the damage to the armies of Hyder Ali and the Marathas. Greenlaw fixed the condition of the monuments at a date, against which both later loss and later restoration can be measured. The gopura he framed still stands, and the chariot is still in front of it.

📸 Cover: the stone chariot and eastern gopura of the Vitthala complex, photographed by Alexander Greenlaw in 1856 and printed for the V&A in 1910, public domain via Wikimedia Commons