Lala Deen Dayal
The Great Elephant Saluting
An elephant raises its trunk for the camera.
- Artist
- Lala Deen Dayal
- Date
- 1885–1900
- Medium
- Albumen silver print from glass negative, 21.1 × 27.3 cm
- Where it is
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011.599.1a)
- Kind
- Photography in India
A large tusker stands side-on in a dusty yard, trunk curled high in salute. A mahout sits on its neck holding something aloft; another man stands by its front feet, dwarfed. Trees blur behind. The print has the warm brown tone of albumen paper.
Deen Dayal, born in Sardhana near Meerut around 1844, trained as an engineer at Roorkee and took up photography while working as a draughtsman in Indore. The Maharaja there was his first patron. He opened studios in Indore, Secunderabad and Bombay, became court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad in 1885, and received a royal warrant from Queen Victoria in 1897. The Nizam gave him the title Raja.
Much of his work was for princes and the Raj: palaces, temples, royal tours, and set-pieces like this one. In 1989 the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi bought 2,857 of his studio’s glass negatives.
