The Kashmir Giants: A Photographic Journey by James Ricalton, 1903
- Mar 16, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 6
Somewhere in the archives sits a photograph of an American photographer standing between two men so tall he barely reaches their shoulders. The image has circulated for over a century, reprinted in books, museum collections and countless corners of the internet, always under the same name: the Kashmir Giants. What almost nobody mentions, because almost nobody actually knows, is what these two men were actually called. Two brothers who stood 7 feet 9 inches and 7 feet 4 inches tall, who became international news in 1903, who were photographed repeatedly by a man who clearly sought them out and considered them friends, and whose real names never once made it into the historical record.
Who Was James Ricalton?
James Ricalton, born in 1844, was an intrepid American photographer and educator whose career was marked by a relentless pursuit of knowledge and discovery. Ricalton's travels took him across the globe, documenting diverse cultures and landscapes with a keen eye for detail and an enduring curiosity. By the time he arrived in India in 1903, he had already established a reputation as a prolific and adventurous photographer.
Before any of that, Ricalton was a schoolteacher in Maplewood, New York, who spent his summer breaks travelling on foot through places few Americans ever visited, including Iceland, Russia and the Amazon basin, pushing a cart large enough to sleep in and shelter from the rain. In 1878, Thomas Edison sent him to Asia specifically to hunt for bamboo fiber suitable for lightbulb filaments, and the sample Ricalton brought back ended up being used in Edison's bulbs for nine months, until tungsten proved better suited to the job.
He left teaching for good in 1891 to become a professional photographer and war correspondent for Underwood & Underwood, the leading stereograph publisher of the era. Over the next 15 years he covered the Spanish-American War in the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria, at one point being held in custody by Japanese military officers during the siege of Port Arthur until a staff officer could confirm he had permission to photograph the front.
By the end of his career he'd travelled more than 500,000 miles and taken over 100,000 photographs. Modern scholars examining his body of work have also been more critical of it than his contemporaries were, arguing his stereographic images of India and Asia reflected the racial and colonial assumptions of his era, framing non-Western subjects through a distinctly Western, ethnographic gaze, the same broader pattern that left two men he clearly knew personally without their names ever making it into his own historical record.
The Delhi Durbar of 1903
The backdrop for Ricalton's most famous portraits was the grand Delhi Durbar of 1903, organised by Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, to mark the succession of King Edward VII as Emperor of India. Edward had turned down the idea of travelling to India himself for a coronation ceremony, so Curzon staged an enormous spectacle in his absence instead, after two years of planning. Ceremonies began on 29 December 1902 with a parade of elephants through the streets of Delhi, and the main event was held on New Year's Day, 1903, on a plain outside the city. Indian Maharajas, Nawabs and regional rulers attended in their finest regalia, each with their own retinue, while the Duke of Connaught represented the British royal family in the King's place.
The Kashmir Giants
Among the crowd, two men stood out literally head and shoulders above everyone else. Brought by the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, they were twin brothers who served as elite riflemen in his personal guard, and they towered over the rest of the Durbar at 7 feet 9 inches and 7 feet 4 inches tall. Newspapers as far away as Australia picked up the story, with The Brisbane Courier running a piece that February titled "The Retinue of the Ruler of Kashmir," dedicated specifically to the two guardsmen who'd become the unexpected stars of the whole event.
Ricalton met the brothers at the Durbar and was clearly taken with them, posing for a series of photographs that show him standing between the two men, comically small by comparison. He didn't stop there. He later travelled to Srinagar in Kashmir itself to photograph them again outside the context of the Durbar's staged pageantry, working at times alongside a second photographer named George Rose.
A Detail Nobody Ever Recorded
It isn't for lack of documentation either. Newspapers on the other side of the world knew their heights down to the inch, knew their regiment, knew who employed them. What survives is the Kashmir Giants, or the Cashmere Giants, or simply "the twin brothers," in every account that's made it to the present, including the contemporary press coverage from 1903 itself. It's a small, quiet example of exactly the kind of erasure common in this era of ethnographic photography, where the measurements of a body were considered worth recording in exhaustive detail while the person attached to it wasn't considered worth naming.
The Authenticity of the Photographs
One of the primary questions surrounding the Kashmir Giants photographs is their authenticity. In an era when photographic manipulation was rudimentary compared to modern standards, Ricalton's images have been scrutinised for signs of alteration. However, most experts agree that the photographs are genuine. Ricalton was known for his integrity and commitment to truthful representation in his work, and the detailed, consistent depictions across multiple images, taken in different locations over time, suggest these were not fabrications but authentic portrayals of two extraordinarily tall men.
What Made Them So Tall
The extraordinary height of the Kashmir Giants has been a subject of speculation ever since, and there are a few plausible explanations, none of them mutually exclusive.
The most straightforward is genetic predisposition. Certain family lines carry a higher likelihood of exceptional height, and as twin brothers, both men would have shared whatever genetic factors were at play. Nutrition and environment could have played a role too, since access to a rich diet and favourable living conditions in Kashmir's fertile valleys can meaningfully affect growth outcomes. A medical condition like gigantism, caused by an overproduction of growth hormone from a pituitary tumor, remains possible as well, though there's no surviving medical record to confirm or rule it out either way. Most researchers who've looked into the case consider genetics the most likely explanation, simply because the brothers shared their extreme height as twins rather than either man being a singular outlier.
A Lasting, if Anonymous, Legacy
The photographs of the Kashmir Giants taken by James Ricalton in 1903 offer more than visual curiosity. They're a documented moment when two guardsmen from Jammu and Kashmir briefly became international news, written up in newspapers on the other side of the world, all while remaining, in the most basic sense, unknown to the audiences who found them so fascinating. Their images still circulate widely today, reproduced in books, museum collections and articles just like this one. Their names never made the trip.
