World Photography Day: How an exhibition unravels India's historical connection with Nepal

The photo, taken sometime in 1901, must have been a formal portrait of the royal household of Dev Shumsher Rana, soon after he became prime minister of Nepal, a post more powerful than the king. Rana sits prominently in the middle of the front row under a royal chhatri, surrounded by women garbed in a diaphanous material whose rich sheen is evident through the faded gray tones of the more-than-a-century-old print. "They seem wrapped in metres and metres of tulle," says Isha Singh Sawhney, co-curator of the show, Nirvasnama, Portraits of a Life in Exile Through Changing Viewfinders, at which the photograph will be a prime exhibit.

The image of Rana in his royal regalia is the oldest of the images at the show. Rana was deposed soon after – his reign lasted a mere 144 days – and came away to India, where he settled with his family in Mussoorie. He never went back to Nepal, dying in Mussoorie in 1909. There's more poignance yet, for Rana was ousted by his brother, Chandra Shamsher, who felt threatened by the progressive measures he had initiated.

Nirvasnama is a vignette of the life the Ranas led in Mussoorie at their sprawling estate called Fairlawn Castle, gleaned from photographs left behind by his daughter, Bhuvan Kumari Devi, one of seven children by his second wife. Devi's collection, around 800 of them, "lay in all kinds of disarray, in trunks and gunny sacks, and were almost destroyed at various times," says Sawhney, who is her great-granddaughter and has been working to document and preserve them with the help of photographer and archivist Aditya Arya for the past four years.

Arya runs the India Photo Archive Foundation that works to conserve 'photographic legacies' and also the Museo Camera, a museum of antique cameras that grew out of his personal collection, built over 35 years. Around 150 of these will also be displayed at Nirvasnama, arranged chronologically along with the photographs – from the giant wooden box cameras on which the earliest images were taken, to the more handy ones used by amateur photographers among the Ranas in the 1930s. The idea, says Arya, is to give people a sense of the technology and conditions in which early photographs were made. To this end, the exhibition will also have two photographic studios, complete with painted backdrop.

The good life

Dev Shumsher Rana may have been deposed, but his family lived a privileged life in India, supported, says Sawhney, by a privy purse from Nepal. The photographs provide evidence of this – fashionably dressed women and men playing tennis, attending picnics and elaborate costume parties.

Mussoorie, says Sawhney, attracted a cosmopolitan crowd at the time, including members of the senior administration and ruling families of princely states across India. The letters in the Bhuvan Devi Archive, she says, give a glimpse of fun-filled days. There's a story of pearls clattering down the slopes of Landour in the early morning when the girls were walking home and the string of pearls one was wearing broke in the revelry.

They also seem to have got themselves photographed a lot, posing languidly with a book, dressed fancily in elaborate garments and elegant jewels, or jauntily in groups. It wasn't all vanity and merry-making, for the photographs seem to also have done the job of post-cards. Short notes were scribbled on the generous margins of these studio prints, several made at one time to send off widely to friends and family. Tell and show – only the advent of photography could allow them to do both.

Nirvasanama – August 19-24, Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Delhi.