The grid: colonial views of India

The first cameras arrived in the Indian subcontinent shortly after their invention in 1839, and they were quickly used to begin documenting the region as part of the wider colonial project. Hence we have these surreal, silvery images from nearly 200 years ago, taken by Colonel Eugene Clutterbuck Impey, initially an East India Company soldier and colonial official who was in the subcontinent from 1851 to 1878. Now published for the first time in Colonial Views of India, a new book and coinciding exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Impey’s photographs are unintentionally multifaceted in the stories they tell.

The collection spans arresting landscapes (temples in the hills, the towering beauty of Qutab Minar) as well as solemn portraits (the Maharaja of Jodhpur with his attendants, Rajput warriors, a woman gazing pensively) and majestic but captive creatures like tigers and leopards. Of course, it is impossible to separate these images from the Orientalist gaze of their provenance; Impey was a political agent for the newly established British Raj, tasked with monitoring the conduct of local rulers.

Both the exhibition and the book ask us to consider these historical images in that context; to think about the wider ideologies and hierarchies embodied by Impey’s archive. As curator Mallica Kumbera Landrus notes: “His photographs serve as a visual representation of this imperial purpose […] Such images often reinforced stereotypes about different races and cultures, fulfilling a demand for exotic depictions of far-off places while also justifying the imperial effort to ‘civilise’ colonised peoples.”

Colonial Views of India is at the Ashmolean, Oxford, until 13 December; ashmolean.org

Photographs by Eugene Clutterbuck Impey /Ashmolean Museum