One of my favourite mediums of visual expression is photography. Photographs often reveal more than what meets the eye; they contain layers of meaning that unfold through careful reading. As colonisers, the British were meticulous documenters. Photography emerged as a “vital mode of data capture and transmission” in the 19th century, particularly as ethnographic surveys were developed by the Western world from the 1830s onward to study the races, cultures and perceived characteristics of the colonised and the “other.”
In February 2026, DAG presented a much-needed re-examination of this vast colonial archive at Bikaner House, New Delhi. Titled Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, and curated by historian Sudeshna Guha, the exhibition brought together nearly 200 photographs produced over 65 years. It assembled albumen and silver-gelatin prints, cartes-de-visite, cabinet cards, postcards, folios, albums, and rare publications. At its centre were folios from The People of India, the eight-volume series compiled by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye between 1868 and 1875. The series was among the most ambitious colonial attempts to catalogue the subcontinent’s population.
The material revealed the geographic and social reach of ethnographic photography. Lepcha and Bhutia communities from the northeast, Afridis from the northwest, and Todas from the Nilgiris appeared alongside occupational and social categories such as Parsis, merchants, barbers, coolies, snake charmers, and dancing girls. The curatorial framework centred on a critical interrogation of typology. Categories such as caste, tribe, occupation, and community were shown to be historically constructed rather than inherently fixed. As photography became a key instrument of modern anthropology, it lent these categories the authority of visual evidence. At the same time, photographs were presented as mutable objects whose meanings shift across contexts, viewers, and historical moments. The display emphasised ambiguity, interpretation and the instability of photographic truth.
The exhibition also foregrounded the agency of the photographed subjects. Through posture, dress, and self-presentation, individuals participated in shaping their own visibility. This reframed ethnographic photography as a space of negotiation rather than a purely extractive colonial gaze. Photographs by Benjamin Simpson and Charles Shepherd showed how communities were fixed within administrative and military frameworks, including the labelling of certain groups as “criminal” or as “martial races.” In contrast, Samuel Bourne’s documentation of a Toda settlement in the Nilgiris revealed how ethnographic photography functioned within networks of colonial administration, missionary activity and early anthropological research.
The images also demonstrated how textual framing shaped interpretation. Portraits by Willoughby Wallace Hooper revealed how notions of tribal authenticity were constructed through controlled settings and symbolic attributes. William Johnson’s widely circulated photographs, accompanied by descriptive letterpress, transformed individuals into representatives of social categories. His portraits of urban elites, when contrasted with labouring figures photographed by Edward Taurines, reflected the visual hierarchies through which colonial photography organised Indian society into ordered categories of class, occupation, and respectability.
Samuel Bourne’s A Group of Kashmir Females, Srinuggur arranged and aestheticised female subjects within narratives of beauty and spectacle. Photographs by GR Lambert & Co. depicting Indian migrant families in Southeast Asia expanded the geographic frame, revealing the imperial networks through which Indian identities were documented and circulated. The exhibition also examined the afterlives of ethnographic imagery. Subjects such as nautch performers, widely reproduced as “girls,” moved from administrative and anthropological contexts into commercial and voyeuristic circuits.
Presented as an India Art Fair parallel exhibition and part of DAG’s long-term effort to build one of the country’s largest collections of early photography, typecasting functioned as a project of archival recovery. By framing the material through a critical lens, the exhibition invited contemporary audiences to revisit colonial visual archives and reflect on the enduring legacies of classification that continue to shape social perception.
Ultimately, the strength of typecasting lay in its refusal to offer definitive conclusions. Curator Sudeshna Guha deftly wove rare material, rigorous scholarship and a sharply articulated vision, transforming a colonial archive into a space for critical reflection. An elegant, richly illustrated catalogue edited by Guha crowns the exhibition, with contributions from Christopher Pinney, Ashish Anand, Ranu Roychoudhari, Suryanandani Narain, and Omar Khan, extending its intellectual resonance well beyond the gallery