Does a real photo from 1903 show a "Bengali woman carrying a British trader" depicting "the height of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent"? No, that's not true: The image is fake. OpenAI's verification tool detected the image has a SynthID watermark and was made with tools from OpenAI. There are also glitches characteristic of AI-generated images such as the malformed hands. Reverse image searches do not uncover any copies of the image earlier than what has been posted on social media since June 2026. What makes this case more complex is that the wording of the caption was recycled from social media posts showing a different and real photo from 1903.
One copy of the fake image was posted (archived here) by the X account @xagreat on June 25, 2026. It was captioned:
People who did this are trying to lecture us about humanity.
The image in the post was cropped to display in a vertical format:
(Image source: @xagreat post on X.)
Lead Stories used Google Lens to look for additional copies of the image and try to find the origin of the image. The results pointed to social media posts -- but the image did not have a traceable history online or pre-internet that one would expect from a memorable 1903 photo.
A June 17, 2026, Instagram post (archived here) has a horizontal format image that shows two additional figures in the background. The post caption had been edited by its author to apologize for posting an AI-generated image. However, other information in the caption regarding the people in the real photo repeats unverified information, as this fact check mentions later. It says in part:
Mea culpa.... This is an AI generated image. The real one is showing a burmese woman with a french colonialist touring british myanmar ... I can share that pic if you dm me. A #Bengali woman carrying a #British merchant on her back... in 1903, the height of British #colonization of the Indian subcontinent.
This is indeed an AI-generated image. The verification tool from OpenAI found a SynthID watermark in the image, indicating it was made with OpenAI tools (pictured below).
(Image source: OpenAI.)
A June 18, 2026, post on Facebook has a high-resolution copy of the image 1,401 by 1,123 pixels (archived here). The post is captioned:
A Bengali woman carrying a British merchant on her back...
📸 The photo was taken in 1903 AD
at the height of British colonization of the Indian subcontinent.
(Image source: @WaseemAltafOfficial post on Facebook.)
This high-resolution image shows some glitches typical of AI-generated images. The man's hands are malformed and appear to hold some ropes almost as one would hold reins when riding a horse. The ropes don't appear to serve a function but do seem to cut painfully into the woman's shoulders. The man's shoes are rendered with the precise detailing of open laced derby shoes, but there are no visible shoe laces.
(Image source: details from @WaseemAltafOfficial post on Facebook.)
A real photo from 1903
A search of Google for the words in many of the social media post captions, "1903 A Bengali woman carrying a British merchant on her back", points to a different photograph -- a real photo from 1903. This real photo has been circulated on social media for years with various captions. Near the top of the Google search results are two promising links. A photo (pictured below) on Wikimedia Commons (archived here) and a Nov. 7, 2021, article from Fake History Hunter (archived here) titled, "Not a French colonial administrator being carried". The article discusses some of the misleading claims from social media and the efforts they made to learn more about the image.
The Wikimedia image was uploaded on Nov. 12, 2013, the image description says:
A British merchant being carried by a Sikkimese lady on her back. West Bengal circa 1903.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons.)
