Peter Murray finds similarities between the fictional character Kim and 19th-century photographer John Burke, whose path in Afghanistan, has been retraced by Simon Norfolk
In 1882, Rudyard Kipling travelled to Lahore, to take up a job as a journalist with the Civil and Military Gazette. Three years later, the Irish photographer John Burke set up a studio in that same city, now the capital of Pakistan. Even if they did not meet personally, Kipling was familiar with Burke’s photographs, which included portraits and carte-de-visite, as well as views of the mountain ranges, palaces and temples of North-West India. On 6 December 1886, Kipling reviewed Burke’s photographs of the Viceroy and other dignitaries arriving for the ‘Lahore Gathering’, commenting favourably that Burke’s sitters seemed more at ease than was the case with most portrait photographs. The son of an Irish soldier who died while serving in the Indian army, Burke had been raised an orphan in the 1850s in the border town of Peshawar, where he was apprenticed to a chemist and learned the art of photography. His large plate views, taken in the 1860s for the Indian Archaeological Survey, and later, when he accompanied the 1879 invasion of Afghanistan, were popular in India, and even more so in England, where there was great curiosity about these outposts of Empire. Although he is thought to have come from Co Wicklow, Burke named his house and studio ‘Kinturk’, which may be a reference to Kanturk in Co Cork.
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