A Portrayal of People: Essays on Visual Anthropology in India

It has often been said that India lives in many centuries at the same time. The complex network of diversity that stretches across time and space has made India a paradise for anthropologists. Not all of them have come from abroad, or represented a colonial relationship; India’s own achievement in this discipline has been considerable, thanks to the outstanding contribution of individual anthropologists and to the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI). Even in the visual field the range of work seems formidable if one takes into account the non-formal, but nonetheless important, study of communities expressed in the documentary film and the fictional cinema meant for the general public, in addition to the visual records for academia made by the Anthropological Survey of India in its 50-odd films and thousands of still photographs. Many streams have thus contributed to the development of visual anthropology in India which is a relatively nascent sub-discipline of anthropology.