Typecasting: Photography, Ethnographic Classification, and the Politics of Looking in Colonial India, 1855–1920

Abstract

This paper explores the exhibition Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855–1920, curated by historian and archaeologist Sudeshna Guha at DAG (Delhi Art Gallery), Bikaner House, New Delhi. Using a collection of photographs from one of India’s largest private holdings of early ethnographic photography, the exhibition questions the process of visually classifying India’s diverse communities based on their racial, tribal, caste-based, and occupational characteristics. Highlighting The People of India (1868–1875)—an eight-volume photographic compilation commissioned in the wake of the 1857 revolt—the exhibition maps the development of a scientific approach to anthropological study through photography to classify Indians for colonial administrative purposes. This paper explores the exhibition’s curatorial approach, which uses the themes of frontier and martial races, trade and occupation, and the genre of “beauties and dancing girls,” and deconstructs the colonially fixed classifications. Contextualising the exhibition through postcolonial studies of colonial visualities by Christopher Pinney and Elizabeth Edwards, the paper discusses how Typecasting destabilises the meaning of the ethnographic photograph.