Bold truth: photography did more than capture India—it helped the British Empire classify and control it. In the latter half of the 19th century, the camera became one of the Empire’s most powerful tools for knowing and sorting the subcontinent.
A new exhibition, Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, organized by DAG (Delhi-based art gallery), brings together nearly 200 rare photographs from a period when imagery was used to classify communities, fix identities, and render India’s rich social differences legible to colonial authorities.
Spanning 65 years, the show charts a broad human geography—from Lepcha and Bhutia communities in the northeast to Afridis in the northwest; from the Todas of the Nilgiris to Parsi and Gujarati elites in western India.
It also casts a light on those placed at the lower rungs of the colonial social order—dancing girls, agricultural laborers, barbers, and snake charmers.
These photographs did more than document India’s diversity. They actively shaped it, turning fluid, lived experiences into seemingly stable and knowable “types.”
Curated by historian Sudeshna Guha, the exhibition centers on folios from The People of India, the influential eight-volume photographic survey published between 1868 and 1875. From this nucleus, it broadens 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 the era.
"Taken together, this material tells the history of ethnographic photography and its impact on both the British administration and the Indian population, in a project of scale and depth that hasn’t been matched in India before," says Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG.
Here’s a selection of images from the exhibition:
