Typecasting

The beginnings of modern anthropological study in India coincided with the introduction of photography in the 1850s and ‘60s. Indeed it could be said that the camera swiftly became the primary instrument for investigation in the field, and the means by which representatives of the subcontinent’s innumerable and diverse communities were ‘captured’ in images for analysis and classification. Looking back, it is obvious that this process was problematic on various levels. From the outset, photography had its own aesthetic conventions and was not entirely the scientific and objective instrument that some people it claimed to be. And the project to categorise and describe the plethora of tribes, castes and communities along regional and racial lines was a colonial enterprise, driven by British perceptions and purposes. The aim of this exhibition is to bring these problems under critical scrutiny, and to make the material available for fresh interpretation by new audiences.

Over the last decade, DAG has been collecting early ethnographic photographs (along with other genres of early photography in India) and now possesses one of the largest collections in the country. Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920 is thus one of the largest exhibitions of colonial ethnography ever held in India, and includes images of a diversity of people across geography and economic groups; from the northeastern Lepcha and Bhutia tribes to the Afridis of Sind in the northwest and the Todas of the Nilgiris in the south; and from rich Parsee and Gujarati communities to people from the lowest-income groups. The collection demonstrates that early ethnographic photography in India not only shows the country’s diversity but actively defined our social and economic groups.

The core of the collection is a selection of folios from The People of India, an eight-volume series of photographs, with descriptive letterpress, which was compiled by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye and published between 1868 and 1875. The series featured some of the pioneering field photographers of India, such as James Waterhouse, William Willoughby Hooper and Francis Frith, and brilliant commercial firms such Skeen & Co. and Nichols and Sons. Around this core are albumen and silver-gelatin prints by many other eminent photographers, covering a broad time span from 1855 to 1920. Also featured are photographic postcards, cabinet cards, cartes de visite, published books and photo albums. Taken together, this material tells the history of ethnographic photography and its effect on the British administration and the Indian population, in a project which in size and depth has never before been seen in India.