Seeing Tribes, Types and Photographs: Photography’s Civic Negotiations

Abstract

This talk will explore the visual histories of some of the tribal people in North East India, particularly Sikkim (where I am undertaking research on aspects of frontier states) through photographs of the colonial and post-colonial periods. I hope to illustrate the similarities in ‘picture-taking’ and uses and curation of the photographs, and thereby, the mutations of ostensibly, different historiographies of viewing. An object of enquiry is to gauge the extent to which photographs of ethnographic intent fashion identity politics even today. Photography and photographic archives historically document productions of typology. They, therefore, constitute powerful spaces for interrogating practices of classifying and category-making, which assumes increasing urgency as violent identitarian politics enmeshes the ‘hill tribes’ of India.