India

The Ganges (or Ganga) River is sacred to many Hindus who visualize the river as a goddess. These two photographs depict the Ganges in the ancient city of Banaras (known more commonly today as Varanasi) but

The two-page spread suggests that the photos form a single panorama when they actually depict the same side of the river. Gardner’s liberal use of these images to compose an imaginary scene exemplifies a common practice among Western travelers at the time who regularly portrayed India in a way that aligned more closely with their fantasies of the picturesque Orient than with reality.

—Siddhartha V. Shah, Director, Mead Museum of Art, Amherst College

View the full album in our online Collection database.

This image from the second of Gardner’s two India albums shows the performance of the nautch, a court dance performance. We know from her diary that Gardner attended the performance of a nautch when she was visiting northwest India, a region historically controlled by the Mughal Empire. The setting, a central courtyard surrounded by open balconies, may look familiar. The space recalls Gardner’s own museum Courtyard: she seems to have been inspired both by Mughal and Italian architecture when designing the space.

Gardner likely bought this watercolor, painted in the style of the Mughal Empire in Northwest India, when she visited the subcontinent in 1884. She enclosed it in her travel album from that trip. It shows the Hindu god Krishna dancing on the body of the serpent Kaliya. The small painting may have attracted Gardner because it unites two themes that we see in her Indian travel albums: dance and Hindu spirituality.