Photographing the Adivasi people of the Nilgiris: The Museum and the Art School
January 2019
This essay considered how the photograph ‘Cassevaroo woman’, and the collection of twenty-one mounted albumen prints to which this photograph belongs, entered the V&A collection and the ways in which they represent distinct ways of looking at Adivasi people, facilitated by the colonial Art School, the Department of Science and Industry and The South Kensington Museum.
Multiple prints of these images were made and looking at the trajectories of these physical objects gives us the fullest picture of the intention and use of these photographs.
These trajectories demonstrate how these images were shaped by three ways of looking: the act of looking at the body and the use of these images as artist studies, the act of looking at nature and these images as representations of land, leisure and labour, and the act of looking at race and these images as ethnographic studies. The essay places these acts in the context of the institutional nexus of the Art School, the DSA, and the museum to reflect on what has been called the colonial traces ‘stalking museums’ today.
This essay is aligned with Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham argument in Art and the British Empire, who argue that ‘empire belongs at the center, rather than in the margins, of the history of British Art’.