One of the most irritating features of the - now, fortunately departing - image of this being a land of saints and scholars was the weird, almost perverse expectation abroad that Ireland was populated by a special people, writes Kevin Myers. Economic backwardness was taken as holy simplicity; ignoble, craven subservience as piety.
Visitors came to the moral and authoritarian sink that was Ireland in the 1950s, very possibly the world capital of childhood buggery and infantile torture, and proclaimed it to be the model for humanity, even as the more spirited natives were fleeing for Holyhead, Liverpool and condoms.
Irritating? Unbearably so; but imagine what it is to be Indian, when for decades every single disconnected, inadequate soul around the world thought they could travel to the Ganges and discover Hindu culture and inner peace at the feet of some mumbling swami.
It's not that such native wisdoms have no value, just that it's unlikely that outsiders will soon be rewarded by them. Perhaps the best way to perceive a foreign culture is to observe and record at its simplest level: by camera.
Unknown photographer
That's what John Burke did when he moved to India from Wicklow. And, as it turned out, he was a true artist, perhaps the first Irishman to use the medium of photography to express his art: he certainly was one of the greatest photographers of his time. Yet he is utterly unknown in Ireland, and it is not hard to understand why. All of his work was in the sub-continent: moreover, he was serving as a soldier in the Raj in the latter half of the 19th century, which makes him rather unfashionable in his native country.
Omar Khan, the author of From Kashmir to Kabul (Prestel), is clearly untroubled by Burke's imperial connections. Even though Burke, and his collaborator William Baker, were both British soldiers, they were also both Irish Catholics, and Omar Khan considers that their low status within the hierarchy of the empire enabled them to identify more readily with the people of India and Afghanistan. Possibly.
Though both fine photographers, Burke was the more talented, and prolific: yet because they worked so much together, it's not always easy to identify which photographer took which picture. But between them, they have bequeathed an almost priceless legacy to India and to Ireland; to the former, because they have provided so many marvellous and enduring insights into the lives of ordinary Indian communities, and to the latter because of their hitherto unseen and unsung contribution to Irish visual arts.
Burke in particular seems to have related deeply and ardently with India. His love of the country and its cultures fills his photographs. His pictures of Europeans are stiff, formulaic, mannered: a class system captured in the light-sensitive silver alloys of photogravure. His pictures of India and Indians, however, are alive with inventiveness, passion and enthusiasm.
Cultural complexity
Nowhere divides people as much as India does. Some people cannot abide it - the noise, the dirt, the poverty, the beggars, the millions upon millions of people; but intelligent, wise people adore it, even though we cannot begin to grasp the complexity of its culture and its traditions. It still seems perfectly incomprehensible that a few thousand people from a couple of damp, cold, offshore islands beside the north-western edge of Eurasia should cross the world and presume to rule its vast landmass.
Thus by the mysterious mechanics of fate and history did John Burke from Wicklow come to be a photographic chronicler of the Raj at its height, of the people it governed, and the landscape over which its writ ran, though often lightly. He certainly was an inspired photographic portrait-painter: his picture of Subedar Major Mial Singh, an 80-year-old Sikh warrior, is a minor masterpiece which today's photographers, with an extra century and a quarter of photographic experience, could hardly improve upon.
And Burke's group shots of ordinary people put him in a class quite of his own. When he assembled some modest landowners and labourers in Kabul, then briefly under British occupation, in order to be photographed, they had most probably never seen a camera in their lives. In Afghans' experience, foreigners came to pillage and to impose their will on them, yet here was this Feringhee with his strange equipment making pictures of them; and such pictures.
Artistic enthusiasm
He took pictures of Kabul nautch girls, surgeons and physicians, hill tribesmen, and slaves. These are photographed not merely with the same respect that he showed his European sitters, but with an artistic enthusiasm untouched by condescension. He was a visitor in a strange land and, dazzled, he let the native faces and the native poses speak for themselves.
His landscapes, yet again, are different. He constructed them superbly, with the care of Caravaggio: his panorama of the Afghan town of Bala Hissar is a seamless three-shot panorama which he composed with astounding detail and depth of focus. When you see a picture such as this, even in black and white, you can understand how traditional landscapists began to abandon their art in despair.
John Burke fathered at least two children out of wedlock, and died of cirrhosis of the liver, aged 57, at Lahore, in May 1900. In other words, a rake. We owe an enormous debt to Omar Khan, who has done an enormous amount of research, even tracking down many of Burke's descendents, to enrich the wise and scholarly text which accompanies Burke's pictures. One final, vital question: is there a single copy of this marvellous book, From Kashmir to Kabul, available in Irish bookshops?