Nation Celebrates Gandhi Jayanti Today, his rare pictures on auction

As the whole nation pays tribute to its 'Bapu', his rare informal pictures taken on August 7, 1942 — the day before he made his historic Quit India speech to the All India Congress Committee in Mumbai — are to go under the hammer at Bonhams in London on October 5.

These hitherto-unseen pictures — showing the Mahatma in an informal setting with an unidentified woman, with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and a couple of other Congress leaders in another, and taking an early morning constitutional with two companions on Juhu beach in the third — were taken by Mumbai photographer Jayant R. Lalan.

This folio with 21 images of Gandhi, shot by Lalan and Ahmedabad photographer Jagan V. Mehta, and two of Jawaharlal Nehru, is expected to fetch anything between £1,000 and £1,500 (Rs 71,230 to Rs 1.06 lakh).

The October 5 auction, titled Travel and Photography: India and Beyond, has an attention-grabbing mélange of 294 lots of rare pictures — besides Gandhi and Nehru, we see pictures of maharajas and common people, of hill stations such as Nainital and Shimla, and some of the earliest pictures of historically significant cities of the country.

The most valued lot is an album of 15 pictures of the historic city of Hampi, now a world heritage site, in northern Karnataka. Among the earliest pictures of the site, these were shot by Dr Andrew Charles Brisbane Neill of the Indian Medical Service in 1855 and is expected to fetch anything between £4,000 and £6,000 (Rs 2.85 lakh to Rs 4.28 lakh).

Neill (1814-1891) was a member of the Photographic Society of Bengal and documented the temple architecture of Belur and Halebid.

Among the beautiful pictures from the collection is an albumen print of the Taj Mahal taken from the banks of the Yamuna in 1858 by Felice Beato, who was notorious for staging some of his pictures of the Revolt of 1857. The image is most likely to fetch £600 to £ 800 ( Rs 42,800 to Rs 57,000).

Another set of pictures are those of Cave 32 in Ellora shot by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mack Nepean while on leave from the Madras Staff Corps in 1868. Also on sale is the complete run of 51 issues for 1848 of the weekly, The Friend of India . The other big draws are a 1910 photograph of the ivory drum of Tipu Sultan, mounted on an elephant probably in Darbhanga, a 1910 portrait of K. S. Ranjitsinhji, the maharaja who became a cricketing legend, and a 1950 album documenting the royal visit of Maharaja Jivaji Rao Scindia of Gwalior to Nepal for the wedding of a son of the maharaja of Jaisalmer with the daughter of one of the Ranas.

The visual chronicle of India’s historical heritage is finding a growing international market. The buzz about the Bonhams auction is yet another testimony to that fact.