Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh

Here's a short South Asian general knowledge quiz. When did the British leave India? When was Partition, and at whose instigation? In what year was the state of Bangladesh founded, and why? And should a photographic exhibition that claims to examine the history of the medium over 150 years in these three countries be able to provide this information?

I think it should. Photography was invented in the West, at a point (the 1830s) when much of India was effectively the private property of the East India Company. By the 1850s these conquerors were recording their territories, soon the resident maharajas were being pictured in their finery and delicately, gorgeously hand-tinted sepia photographs were attempting to bring photography within the Indian tradition of miniaturist painting - and also, perhaps, to portray the complications of what was effectively an apartheid state in which nothing was really black and white.

By the 1940s, the monochrome subjects in their baggy suits, with bicycles and American-style cars and of course, cameras, are looking less obviously 'other' than those exotic, hand-tinted nawabs and princes (Nehru's grandsons, photographed with him in 1948, look just like British schoolboys). The spectrum spins again with the advent of Bollywood and, in Pakistan, Lollywood: the colours may be harsher but they, like the careful poses, harken back to a radiant, self-determined India less interested in compromise than in appropriation.

This isn't a comparison that's easy to make in this garbled exhibition, however. Just about the only organising principle is the division of this enormous mass of images, many of them exceptionally beautiful, into five categories. The allocation is somewhat arbitrary (do courtesans really belong in 'Family'?) and entirely inadequate, since there is no chronological, historical or thematic coherence at all. The clusters of pictures are haphazard and inadequately captioned, failing to explain who, for example, Benazir Bhutto is, much less why Pakistani photographer Raghu Rai thought her election worth zooming in on.

Granted, many of these pictures are pure aesthetic pleasure: three frog-like boys leaping into water by TS Satyan; Manoj Kumar Jain's 'Crab Collectors'; Deepak John Mathew's Eggleston-like interiors; Lala Deen Dayal's richly cluttered nineteenth-century albumen prints of palaces. Yet surely it would have been better to offer a trajectory from one South Asian photographer to another, with reference to their influences Eastern or Western (Henri Cartier-Bresson was hugely important) as an initial gesture towards constructing a coherent history of Eastern photography?

Here, you don't even know which country you're in - the photographers are mere names, the interesting predilection in both Pakistan and India for senior female politicians, despite harsh restrictions on women elsewhere, remains unexamined. Statesmen, gods, musicians and actors are pictured and named, but never explained. And there are probably just too many photos for this to function as the artistic equivalent of a river cruise, with scenic delights flicking past without sinking in. Not that that should have been the aim, anyway: South Asia doesn't need help from the mother country any more, thank you very much, but is it not nonetheless a contentious political act to deprive a former colony of its context?