James Cobb Burke: An American Photojournalist in South Asia

Faiza Khan is a graduate student in the Art History department at Binghamton University whose focus lays in the history of modern architecture in South Asia as well as the intersections of Eastern and Western material cultures. Faiza received the 2025 Rose Library Fellowship for Southern History & Culture.

My time in the Stuart Rose library at Emory University allowed me to examine an extensive collection of papers belonging to the Time-Life news correspondent James Cobb Burke, he was also an Emory University alumnus. While Burke is mainly known for his photojournalism at Time-Life, he also wrote many articles for the publication.[1] My research focuses on modern architectural history in South Asia, therefore the opportunity to look through Burke’s photographs and correspondence from his tenure in this region impacts my work greatly.

Burke covered 2,000,000 square miles of Asia including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Vietnam.[2] Of particular importance to my project was Burke’s 1954 trip to Dacca, East Pakistan (now Dhaka, Bangladesh). Photographs from this visit are available for viewing via Time-Life’s archive on Google Arts and Culture. However, no metadata or additional information is given regarding these images. Additionally, from some preliminary research I have done it seems that these photographs have not been published in any issues of Time or Life magazine. This void in information creates a mysterious nature surrounding these pictures.

In Burke’s archive I managed to find a small notebook he kept from this excursion and some contact sheets with images found in the Google Arts and Culture archive. The contact sheets show frames from a roll of film in print. Burke labeled the backs of these prints with their corresponding roll numbers and documented in his notebook what these rolls captured. The small journal also holds questions Burke planned to ask, contact information for various figures he planned to visit, sites on his itinerary he would photograph, and some comments regarding the sociopolitical atmosphere and landscape of Dacca.

This information is integral to my project in that I have a particular interest in the role Muslim businessmen and business networks played in the early development of the city of Dacca. Burke toured and photographed the Adamjee Jute Mills, its workers, and owner who was a South Asian Muslim with some roots in Calcutta, West Bengal in India. Another key business appearing in this collection of photos is the Gulistan Cinema Hall which was commissioned by the film distributor and Muslim businessman Fazal Dossani.[3] The cinema was designed by Yahya Merchant, an architect from Bombay who was also Muslim.[4]

Historically there has been an assumption that most of the high-profile businessmen of colonial India were either Hindu or Parsi and that Muslims largely were far behind.[5] However, the emergence of a self-supporting economic enterprise in post partition Pakistan strongly suggests that Muslims did indeed occupy an important place in industry and trade during late colonial India.[6] These businessmen related to Burke’s photographs in Dacca come from families with a long history of having been in business during the colonial and post-colonial eras of the Indian subcontinent. The story of these families’ migrations and their impact on the built environment is an intricately webbed history that I am trying to unfold.

Burke’s trip in 1954 was only seven years after the partition of India in 1947 which created a Pakistan divided in two parts – East and West that were separated by thousands of miles of Indian territory. The years after partition were politically tumultuous in the Indian subcontinent with tensions high between and within the new nations. Burke’s photographs capture some of these tensions, particularly showing a strong military presence in Dacca. Soldiers, officers, and armored vehicles are found scattered throughout these images in both military and civilian settings. Burke’s journal also references specific military personnel.

Some pressures laid out in Burke’s journal allude to tensions between indigenous residents of Dacca versus those who were seen as “outsiders”. Overall, the observation of these stresses seems to be symptomatic of the ongoing political turmoil across both wings of Pakistan at the time. In addition to Burke’s 1954 trip to Dacca, I also found photographs and documents related to other infrastructural projects developing in India and Pakistan during the 1950s and 1960s. As I am in the early phases of my project this rich repository that I was able to access at the Rose Library will lay a good foundation for the future of my work.

 

Bibliography

Dasgupta, Koushiki. 2015. “Muslim Businessmen and Partition: A History of Fragment or a Fragmented History?” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 511-520.

Engineering Forum. 1960. “Yahya C. Merchant.” Engineering Forum 43.

Farooq, Mohammad Omar. 2019. “The ages of Gulistan.” Manabzamin, January 17: 1. Accessed June 10, 2025. https://mzamin.com/article.php?mzamin=155014#gsc.tab=0.

 

Citations

[1] “James Cobb Burke, Photographer LIFE Magazine,” James Cobb Burke, Photographer LIFE Magazine, accessed January 31, 2025, https://www.jamesburkelifephotographer.org.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Farooq, Mohammad Omar. 2019. “The ages of Gulistan.” Manabzamin, January 17: 1. Accessed June 10, 2025. https://mzamin.com/article.php?mzamin=155014#gsc.tab=0.

[4] Engineering Forum. 1960. “Yahya C. Merchant.” Engineering Forum 43.

[5]Dasgupta, Koushiki. 2015. “Muslim Businessmen and Partition: A History of Fragment or a Fragmented History?” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 511-520.

[6] Ibid.