Tara will present on photographs of Indian women taken in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by British colonial administrators. Some of these men were amateur photographers who took these images as part of their private archive that recorded their time in India, and sit alongside journals, letters and travelogues that detail their lives and travels. However, these women were also subjects of more systematic, state-sponsored ethnographic projects of classification and documentation. 1857 marked a turning point for colonial rule, and the history of photography in India needs to be situated in the context of the huge political and cultural upheaval of this moment. 

As Zahid Chaudhary (2012) has pointed out, the extraordinary proliferation of photographs of “the native” immediately after the Sepoy revolt of 1857 suggests both the availability of cheaper photographic apparatuses and materials and a more complex network of representation, misrepresentation, and colonial anxiety, that led to a large-scale mobilization of the camera as a technology for consolidating imperial rule. The eight-volume The People of India, published between 1868 and 1875, was a direct outcome of this shift in political priorities. It attempted to photograph, describe and create a taxonomy of the ‘races and tribes of Hindustan.’ While most of the photographs are of men, the photographs of women are telling: the women included in this collection are largely lower-caste, and almost always labelled ‘dancing girls’. 

These are not just figures of ethnographic study but also fulfill a more voyeuristic impulse; we are invited to look at their bodies with an openly sexual gaze. Tara’s paper will analyse these photographs – the implications of how and why specific women stand in for a ‘type’ – and consider the slippages between caste and sexuality in this new visual formulation.

Dr. Tara Puri is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Bristol. She researches Victorian periodicals and print culture; women’s writing and history; representations of empire; late 19th and early 20th century Indian literature. Her work has appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Journal of Victorian Culture and Victorian Literature and Culture, and she is currently completing a monograph titled Legible Bodies: Dress, Desire and the Female Self in Victorian Literature and Culture. She also works on contemporary art and politics, and her monograph (co-authored with Benoît Dillet) The Political Space of Art: The Dardenne Brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial was published in 2016.

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