Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855–1920

This exhibition showcases the ability of photography to challenge typologies. The photographs we see here reveal how unstable social categories can be despite photography often being used to support them.

The emergence of photography in the 1850s coincided with the beginnings of modern anthropology. The camera swiftly became the primary instrument for ethnographic investigations, and diverse communities of the Indian subcontinent were thus ‘captured’ for analysis and classification. Looking back, it is obvious that this documentation was problematic on various levels: photography had its own aesthetic conventions and was not the objective instrument that some people claimed it to be. And the nineteenth-century project to typify people into races, tribes, occupations and castes groups was a colonial enterprise driven by British perceptions and purposes. This exhibition brings critical scrutiny to the histories and errors of typecasting, and makes available the historical photographs for new interpretations by new audiences.

Over the last decade, DAG has been collecting early ethnographic photographs of India (along with other genres) and now possesses one of the largest collections in the country. The exhibition showcases a range of photographic material: prints, cabinet cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, folios and albums; and also published books. It maps the diversity of people across a vast geography: from the northeastern Lepcha and Bhutia tribes to the Afridis in the northwest, and the Toda and Vedda in the south; and from talukdars and rich Parsee communities to dancing girls, coolies, barbers and snake charmers. It shows how the early ethnographic photography of India has defined our social and economic groups, but also highlights the propensity of a photograph to constantly accrue new meanings and identities. It points to the possibilities of the transcultural encounters that photography facilitates.

The People of India

Published in eight volumes between 1868 and 1875, The People of India is a collection of around 480 photographs of the, supposedly, representative tribes, ‘races’ and trades and occupations of the Indian subcontinent. Arising from a project commissioned by the first viceroy, Lord Canning, as a memento of India, it quickly expanded into a comprehensive survey of practically the whole of British India: indeed, it was possibly the most ambitious photo-documentation project of the 19th century, and launched the genre of anthropological photography in the Indian subcontinent.

The descriptive letterpress and accompanying notes identify and claim to highlight the distinctive characteristics of each group depicted, and the sequence of images begins in the Bengal Presidency–which curiously included the kingdoms of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal–progressing westwards across modern Uttar Pradesh to Punjab and Sind, before turning south, to cover Rajputana and the Central Provinces. Then down to Mysore, Travancore and Madras, and crossing the Bay of Bengal to Burma and Singapore. Perceptions of race, creed, occupation, evolution, culture and morality, all went into the profiling of a type, and the photographic events often document the unpredictability and contingency which photographing in India entailed for the Sahibs.

Tribe, Community and Anthropological Field Photography

Categories of tribes and communities proliferated from the 1870s. The ‘tribal’ was, typified as representing ‘suspiciously democratic organisational structures’, and ‘exotic appearance and customs’. Notably, the ‘Frontier Tribes’––itself a category––was often trait listed with or without surveys as violent, and the ‘potentates’ were often photographed with guns for the eye to see. They were classified as the martial race, a spurious category which the British accorded to quell their ‘fierce’ resistance and win them over.

The participation of the princely states in the 1891 Census extended the colonial precedents of typecasting in these domains. By then, community categories extended to caste groups, ethnographic enquiries followed either the ‘racist’ or ‘materialist’ mode, and standards for anthropometric surveys were devised. They inspired the multi-volume study of the Castes and Tribes of South India (1909), by Edgar Thurston (Superintendent of Madras Museum), notably with his Indian assistants, which remains the largest single product of the Ethnographic Survey of India.

Trade, Caste, Occupation

The photographic records of trade and caste expectantly overlap, as many trades in India are traditionally caste-based. Nevertheless, many images reveal the photographer’s intention to depict tradespeople in the performance of their profession, and not just a representative of it. This creates a sense of living anthropology. We see a broad variety of people – shopkeepers, boatmen, tea-pickers, barbers, watercarriers, potters, cobblers, coolies, guards, domestic servant and cooks – all engaged in the occupations that supposedly defined them as individuals. Facile characterisations followed the category making of occupations, and a book on the Typical Pictures of Indian Natives (1906) complained that: “The Sinhalese very rarely work as coolies, either on tea estates or elsewhere, this work being almost exclusively carried out by Tamils from Southern India. They are generally sharper than Hindoos, and when carefully trained are capable of making very good workmen.”

Like the images of the nautch girls, those of people at work, also circulated as postcards within colonial India. In that context, they amounted to a catalogue of common experiences. The sender of a postcard depicting snake-charmers, for example, is indicating that s/he has observed such people on the street and thus ‘knows’ this essential element of India.

Beauties and Dancing Girls

The photography of the women of India, albeit as ethnographic subjects, provided opportunities for a kind of voyeurism. While the captions of many images indicate the intent to illustrate a tribe or community, others record a ‘Hindu Woman’, or ‘Group of Kashmiri Female’ or ‘Tamil Lady’, & etc. A favoured genre was the Nautch (dancing) girls, whose poses and expressions carry a barely concealed erotic charge.

However, Daroga Abbas Ali’s photographs of the Ḥasīnān-e Lakhnaʾū (or The Beauties of Lucknow, 1874), is a unique example of attempting something quite different. The ‘paris’ (fairies) in Indur Sabha allowed envisioning the legitimacy of the art of professional performers. And through an album full of them Abbas Ali evoked the presence of the ‘magical court’ of the resplendent Lucknow of the dispossessed and exiled Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, and thereby provided him ‘a cure’.