In the second half of the 19th Century, photography became one of the British Empire’s most persuasive instruments for knowing – and classifying – India.<\/p>\n
A new exhibition – called Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, and organised by DAG, the Delhi-based art gallery – brings together nearly 200 rare photographs from a period when the camera was deployed to classify communities, fix identities and make India’s complex social differences legible to the colonial government.<\/p>\n
Spanning 65 years, the exhibition maps an expansive human geography: from Lepcha and Bhutia communities in the north-east to Afridis in the north-west; from Todas in the Nilgiris to Parsi and Gujarati elites in western India. <\/p>\n
It also turns its gaze to those assigned to the lower rungs of the colonial social order – dancing girls, agricultural labourers, barbers and snake charmers.<\/p>\n
These images did not merely document India’s diversity; they actively shaped it, translating fluid, lived realities into apparently stable and knowable “types”.<\/p>\n
Curated by historian Sudeshna Guha, the exhibition centres on folios from The People of India, the influential eight-volume photographic survey published between 1868 and 1875. From this core, it expands outward to include albumen and silver-gelatin prints by photographers such as Samuel Bourne, Lala Deen Dayal, John Burke and the studio Shepherd & Robertson – practitioners whose images helped define the visual language of that time.<\/p>\n
“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,” says Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG.<\/p>\n
Here’s a selection of images from the exhibition:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the second half of the 19th Century, photography became one of the British Empire’s most persuasive instruments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-437307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}