Darogah Abbas Ali was an engineer in Lucknow in the mid-19th century—which was at that time one of the principal centers of patronage as well as the political and cultural capital of the princely state of Awadh. He took up photography following his retirement and was the only photographer in the nineteenth century to publish his work
in book form- something Alka Patel sees as ‘continuous with the long history of Mughal Painting, in particular itscollection in album format’.
Abbas Ali was one of the few Lakhnavi photographers working within a circumscribed network and had closeness to the royal court and British officialdom. Patronised by Sir George Couper, Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Provinces, Abbas Ali dedicated both of his signed albums to him.
Of the three books published by Abbas Ali, the first was The Lucknow Album, an illustrated guide to the city, published in Calcutta in 1874. This book includes a detailed map of Lucknow with a conjoined descriptive text.
The second album to his credit, The Rajas and Taaluqdars of Oudh, was published in Allahabad in 1880 and the album is essentially a gallery of 342 carte de visite-sized prints of rulers, with notes on their family histories and a multi-chaptered history of the province of Avadh. The work is bilingual.
The third album is titled “Beauties of Lucknow”. The album presents portraits of women characterized as “singers, dancing girls, and actresses,” as per the title page. English and Urdu letterpress are bound in the same volume, the photographs sandwiched in between. Beauties was published eighteen years after the British annexed Avadh. Katheryn Hansen states, “Fully aware of the agenda of British rulers to reform Indian society by marginalizing actresses, dancers, and singers, Ali used portrait photography to endow his subjects with social prestige. To rescue them from a presence of moralistic censure and legal regulation, he situated them in the glorious pre- annexation past. “Beauties of Lucknow” is one of the first attempts in South Asia to photograph professional performers in order to create legitimacy for their art. Resisting the denigration often directed at performing women, Ali identified them with the former political regime, which still enjoyed widespread admiration.