Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on visual representation of the Nagas sourcing from the colonial archives, popular newspapers and illustrated dailies of the late 19th and early 20 century.

Paper long abstract:

The formal end of British colonization and the emergence of nation-states during the latter half of the twentieth century has in more recent years given rise to a new range of studies devoted to reexamining the history, politics, psychology and the language of colonialism. In the Naga Hills of colonial Assam, textual description through monographs, military reports, memoirs and travel diaries have preoccupied scholarly attention towards understanding colonial situation and power exercised over the Nagas. However, it is only recently that photography and representation through visual art, exhibits and museum displays as powerful project of empire and state making has entered anthropological discourses. This paper, explores in two ways the importance of photography in the representation of the Nagas. First, it demonstrates the significance of analysing the visual images of culture and customs of people about whom limited ethnographic writ ings are available, as is the case of the Eastern Nagas. Second, through studying photographs, the paper examines how photography became a 'governmental technology' to define colonial subject through what I call the 'colonizing camera'. Apart from studying the pictures taken by Professor Christopher Von Furer-Haimendorf (who developed the visual anthropology of the Konyak Nagas) the project will examine popular illustrative newspaper and magazine reports and correspondence by colonial officials in order to demonstrate how photography represented the Naga tribes and conferred social meaning to their 'otherness'- as a wild, barbaric, head-hunters, slave takers and 'nomadic races' practising shifting cultivation.