Object of Study

What we’re looking at in class

Photographing the Zenana: Gender and Representation

Breaching long-established norms of propriety and representation, Maharaja Ram Singh II—ruler of the princely state of Jaipur (1835–1881)—took an unprecedented series of photographic portraits of women who practiced the custom of purdah (seclusion) and lived in the zenana (a section of the palace reserved exclusively for women). This photograph of an unidentified woman of the zenana emphasizes her self-assured demeanor, with her arm resting casually yet firmly on a table and eyes gazing directly into the camera lens. In portraying the women of the zenana as dignified and confident, Ram Singh’s photographs challenge British colonial perceptions of the zenana as a dark, dangerous, and unsanitary place, where women were ostensibly oppressed by Hindu patriarchal society. The timing of Ram Singh’s portraits coincides with increasing social reforms for women in British India, including the colonial government’s ban of sati (the immolation of widows) in the early 19th century. While banning sati undoubtedly saved lives, it also helped to justify British imperialism by emphasizing the need to, as literary theorist Gayatri Spivak describes, “save brown women from brown men.” Such social reforms were rarely about the well-being of women; rather, women were merely the ideological battleground on which debates around tradition and modernity were played out. Do Ram Singh’s photographs then serve to challenge Orientalist imaginaries of non-Western cultures? Or, are they a staging of modernity that serves to uphold a traditional value system? These are some of the questions around photography and representation that we discussed in art 305: The Camera in South Asia. —PROF. SHIVANI SUD [ART]

These trees which he plants, and under whose shade he shall never sit, he loves them for themselves, and for the sake of his children and his children’s children, who are to sit beneath the shadow of their spreading boughs.