The exotic, the respectable, and the vulnerable: How the coloniser’s photographs saw Indian women

Photographic representations of colonised Indian women, segregated by the double burden of being colonised and of womanhood, faced further representational violence in the canons of colonial photography. Colonial photographic albums contained pictures of high-caste respectable ladies or rural, vulnerable, malnourished women from the famine years. The albums also had a distinctive liking for “nautch girls”, “bazar women” and courtesans. The albums generally illustrated categories of Indian women divided into the exotic, the respectable and the vulnerable. Gradually, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pictorial/photographic representations of the stereotypes of Indian womanhood began to be distributed through popular picture postcards.

Here, many more typified representations of women engaged in various kinds of work were published. Always, like the early representations in colonial albums, picture postcards relied on social differences. The more plebeian and unwelcome sisters of the Brahmin lady, such as the ayah and the sweeper, nautch girls and the “Hindoo” lady became subjects of picture postcards.

Early Indian photography became a dominant tool for representing regional identities in India, framing the “other”. These were areas of target, where a justification for the imperial drive needed to be settled and the civilising drive of European colonisers needed to be argued. Indians, especially…

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