Framing Hijras: Ethnographic photography in British India (1860-1890)

How was gender deviance produced through ethnographic photography in British India? 

Through an in depth exploration of two photographs of “eunuchs”, and a survey of 100 photographs tagged as “castes” from The British Library Archives, the paper establishes the production of gender deviance through visual codes of caste. By reading the agential role of photographic materiality (how they perform history and meaning), the technology of the camera (how it claims “objectivity”) and the archives (how organisational practices co-author the meaning of the photographs) it presents important methodological approaches to colonial photography. 

It will be of interest to a broad interdisciplinary audience of historians, anthropologists and legal scholars.

About the speaker

Dr Gee Imaan Semmalar is a legal historian who is currently on a visiting fellowship to the IHEID. With a decade of experience in trans and anti-caste movements in India, he is committed to producing socially engaged scholarship.

International History and Politics Department