Skip to main content

People of India: a series of photographic illustrations, 1868

One of the responses of British to the events of 1857 was to try and better categorize the people that they had come to rule. They went around with their cameras and shot all kind of natives, all tribes, castes, races, religions, belonging to places all across the length and breadth of this land and put them in books and added neat captions to these photographs describing in brief the 'must remember' of each native type. All this in hope that it would help them govern these people and more importantly rule the land better. One of the gigantic product of such an exercise was the eight volume series titled 'The People of India' published between 1868 and 1875. Collected from these eight volumes of 'The people of India : a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan' (1868) by John William Kaye, Meadows Taylor, J. Forbes Watson,[available at archive.org] here are 345 photographs of the people of India.



-0-
Labels:

Comments

  1. bvAug 15, 2012, 2:39:00 PM

    I love reading the reports from the very old Census of India. The ones between 1871 and 1901 are available at "Digital Colonial Documents" hosted by the "Digital South Asia Library" at Chicago http://www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au/dcd/census.htm

    I think you might like this, except that content on J&K (since it wasn't quite a part of British India) might be meager and it is huge masses of text.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Vinayak RazdanAug 16, 2012, 1:31:00 AM

    Thanks for the link. That really is a mass of text. And I actually have collected lot of census data of J&K. Even though Kashmir wasn't part of British India it was in a way under British Dominion. The best document on that census data would be 'Gazetteer of Kashmir' (1870-72) by Captain Bates.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I always like to hear back :)
However, irrelevant comments and irrelevant links will not be published. Needless to say, same goes for abusive comment and spam. Leaving back links related to the topic is encouraged. I know it can be tempting but try not to leave your email ids, phone nos and CVs in the comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Old Faces of Doordarshan

Some people recall the faces and some people recall the names. Here are images of some of the famous readers and presenters of Doordarshan down the years. If you recognize any of them, leave a comment. [ Update 1 : Most of the faces now have names thanks to helpful comments by olio-gallimaufry ] [ Update 2 : Included image of one of the earliest presenters, Gopal Kaul. Send in generously from personal collection by son, Ashutosh Kaul. Sept, 2010.] [ Major Update 3: Got a tip-off about a documentary about the famous faces of Doordarshan from the makers   of     “The Golden Trail , DD@50 :Special feature on Golden Jubilee of Doordarshan ” from which these caps were taken. I managed to catch the incredible documentary and am adding some more faces/name and part of the docu here. New ones can be found after the image of  Narotam Puri. 30th Oct, 2010]  Pratima Puri. Believed to be the first Doordarshan reader.
176 comments
Read more

Indian Cigarette Vintage Ads

He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said ‘No thanks.”Richard looked at him.”I packed it in.”"You what?”"I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That’s it. You just make the life choice.” Richard looked up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn’t really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. Almost the only thing that he still liked about Gwyn was that he still smoked…Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met… While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cig
21 comments
Read more

Kishore Kumar, Yodel-ay-ee-oooo Songs, A List

*Updated with corrections pointed out by Bart Plantenga , author of some incredible book on Yodeling including Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World. -0- Kishore Kumar 's brother Anoop Kumar, who we basically know for the line ' O manu tera toh hua ab mera kya hoga ', used to own lots of Austrian music records. And from these records, Kishore Kumar picked up the art of Yodel singing, an art perfected in bathroom and then introduced by him to the world of Hindi film music. According to his biography 'Kishore Kumar: method in madness‎ ' by Derek Bose, "Kishore was a fan of the Swiss singer Tex Norton [* Tex Morton, an Australian cowboy born in New Zealand who sang  in the gene autry / Jimmie Rodgers style ] and the Australian Jimmy Rogers [* Jimmie Rodgers , perhaps the most American and one of the most famous yodelers in the world, famous for his blue yodels ] as well." Although most of these songs by Kishore Kumar are t
18 comments
Read more