In the early hours of February 6, 1993, India’s finest photographic archive, that of Bourne and Shepherd, photographers by ‘special appointment to the Viceroy’, went up in smoke. At daybreak the people of Calcutta woke to find their streets carpeted with singed Victorian prints: maharajas with bird’s-nest beards were lying in the gutters; images of the great Delhi Durbar of 1911 floated over the rooftops of Ballygunge and the lawns of the Tolly Club; Viceroys in white ties fluttered across the Maidan into the Ganga and were washed down unceremoniously into the Bay of Bengal.