An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Sheelalipi Sahana (Heritage Collections Research Fellow, 2025-26)
Scottish Colonial Tourism and the Visual Spectacle of India
My presentation will draw on my research into the University of Edinburgh’s Heritage, Archive and Manuscript Collections to study the visual media produced by Scottish travellers, researchers, and academics to India in the 19th and 20th centuries. These visual and textual narratives of colonial travel and tourism underlie the overlooked side of Scottish Enlightenment, that was rooted in racialised hierarchies and eugenic discourses in the colonies. I will present on the school-going child within visual narratives, examining how, in moments of ‘double exposure’, they reclaim ontological selfhood and recognise their role within the Empire’s curation of ‘ethnographic spectacle’. Using decolonial methodologies of reorienting the natives as subjects within the photographic frames, my presentation will centre the unknown, unnamed figures captured on film, in photographs, and in illustrations, to highlight native counter-gaze. I will use glass slide photographs produced in the late 19th century by Scottish intellectuals affiliated with the University of Edinburgh who travelled to Eastern India for ‘academic research’, in the process capturing young school-going children during various times of the day. This research will not only critically engage with the role that the university has played in sustaining regressive notions of childhood and schooling practices in the Indian colony, but also explore how the subjects being photographed resisted the technological gaze of the camera. I will locate instances of children challenging codification into imperial ideals of Christian childhood by returning or reframing the gaze. I will focus on body language, composition, expression, and action to trace moments of refusal and intervention. This research contributes to decolonial visual anthropology’s focus of recognising non-verbal, non-public modes of ontological resistance to Empire.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81113670095
Passcode: 38bakW8E