S.W.275, 1

Imprint: London: India Museum, 1874. Wm. H. Allen and Co., 13, Waterloo Place, S.W. Publishers to the India Office.

Quarto volume, quarter leather and cloth (rebound 1964), measuring 330 x 268 mm; pp. viii, 45, with list at end of the 54 photographs taken during the tour (copies of those not published here can be found in India Office Collections, APAC Photo 1000). The report includes 23 of the listed photographs, the majority taken or overseen by Burgess, but with two examples of photographs taken by Thomas Biggs twenty years earlier in 1855. In his introduction Burgess stresses the importance of photography as a documentary tool in archaeology and draws attention to the insufficient funds devoted to it by the survey: 'The allowance set down for photography (Rs. 1,500 for the year, or Rs. 250 a month for six months) was manifestly inadequate; it would do little more than pay for materials, etc., but I hoped that by using for this purpose a portion of the other allowances for establishment, and by doing everything I possibly could with my own hands, I might make it suffice. I could hear of no one likely to accept the terms I could offer for the photography, and I therefore employed an assistant moderately acquainted with the processes, and took charge of it myself. This is consequently the department in which the work has suffered most from insufficient funds, though the lenses, camera, etc., were provided free of expense to Government. The Honourable Mr. Gibbs, in paragraph 24 of his Minute, and the Government of Bombay, in paragraph 2 of the Despatch accompanying it, had suggested somewhat more liberal allowances, but such were not granted ...' (Preface, p. vi). The staff Burgess had to hand ('two assistants and a servant to clean glass plates, etc.'), should, therefore, be enlarged to include two students from the Bombay School of Art to copy sculpture and architectural detail, a competent photographer and a Pandit to copy inscriptions: 'Such a staff might be employed at only a slight increase on the present allowances, and would enable me to do the same amount of work at any given place in half the time and in a better style...'