New Delhi, February 11 An exhibition here showcases colonial ethnographic photographs of India's diverse populations, mapping communities across a vast geography from the Lepcha and Bhutia tribes in the northeast to the Afridis of Sind in the northwest and the Todas of the Nilgiris in the south.
"Typecasting: Photographing the People of India 1855-1920" by DAG at Bikaner House spans geographies and cultures while bringing critical scrutiny to the histories and errors of typecasting.
Curated by historian Sudeshna Guha, the exhibition brings together nearly 200 rare photographs and photographic material as it attempts to reflect on the systems of classification and on the typologies that were created in the colonial period.
"Through photographs of the colonial endeavours of typecasting the people of India, the exhibition draws attention to the construct that is a typology, or a class. It shows the uncertainties in type-making and encourages seeking a visual history of the early photography and anthropology of India beyond the colonial gaze, to reckon with the inherent mutability of photographs," Guha said in a statement.
At the core of the collection is a selection of folios from "The People of India", an eight-volume series of photographs, compiled by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye and published between 1868 and 1875, featuring some of the pioneering field photographers of India, including Benjamin Simpson, James Waterhouse, William Willoughby Hooper and John Burke, and the little known commercial firm Shepherd and Robertson.
The exhibition also features albumen and silver-gelatin prints by eminent photographers including Samuel Bourne, Charles Shepherd, Darogha Abbas Ali, Lala Deen Dayal, G R Lambert & Co, Edward Taurines and Hurrychand Chintamon, from 1855 to 1920.
"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. It could be said that the camera swiftly became the primary instrument for investigation in the field of modern anthropology, and the means by which representatives of the subcontinent’s innumerable and diverse communities were ‘captured’ in images for analysis and classification," Ashish Anand, CEO and MD of DAG, said.
He added that while it becomes obvious that this process was "problematic on various levels", the aim of the exhibition is to encourage fresh interpretations by new audiences.
A range of photographic material, including prints, cabinet cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, folios, albums, and published books, are also part of the exhibition.
The exhibition will come to an end on February 15.