CAPTURING WOMEN IN THE IMPERIAL FRAME: GENDER, PHOTOGRAPHY AND COLONIAL GOVERNANCE

Abstract

This paper outlines the early usage of camera in India as photographic technology making its way into the colonial discourse as means of visually mapping the unruly native-population in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-8. My paper looks into pictures of two women found in a series of catalogue titled ‘People of India’ (1868-75) as a way of seeing the construction of Oriental feminine in the official records. While the project laboured on its ideal vision of organizing the disorderly native-subject, it simultaneously produced racial and sexist accounts of India vis-à-vis the imaginings of the ruling dispensation. The photographic portraits of women while overtly posing as strategies of documentation and reform were covertly used for titillation and colonialist expansion. Keeping in line with the prevalent imperial policies designed to downgrade the status of these women as polluting the social and moral fibre of society, the picturization of their bodies was further a means of confining their influence from public spaces. The still images stuck in time confined the transgressive sexualities while being imbued in the contradictions of castigating them and concurrently publicizing them as objects for gratification in the classificatory regime of the album series.