In Kerala’s colonial photography archives, people gaze back at us – some named, categorized, but many left entirely unrecorded. These photographs from British-era Kerala capture moments of stillness: people working, posing, witnessing. But behind each frame lies a pressing question that colonial visual records often fail to answer: who were these people?
Hands crossed; gaze unwavering. She exists simply as an unnamed woman from Kerala. Preserved not as a person with a history, but as an image without annotation, she represents the many anonymous figures whose presence lingers across colonial records of Kerala. Who was she? How did she come to be photographed? And why was her identity never recorded? Among the countless unnamed and uncategorized figures scattered through colonial photo archives, hers is a familiar face, not for who she was, but for how common her condition was.
This essay turns away from abstract theories of identity and representation. It engages with the named and unnamed presence of people across two photographic collections of Kerala: those of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Alen Campbell McKay. These images, made during the early 20th century, span ethnographic fieldwork, personal albums, to professional documentation. Through interlinked sections, this essay explores what it meant to be photographed and yet remain unnamed, to appear in an archive but not in history.
People embodying action and life in colonial photographs
It is not infrequent that we encounter people not as posed portraits, but as bodies in motion. These are the unnamed labourers, market-goers, and field workers who populate the Kerala archive, caught mid-task: walking, carrying, harvesting. Their actions are unmistakable. Yet, their names are absent. Their identities are flattened into occupational types, a visual shorthand for “how life looked” in colonial Kerala.
The longer our gaze lingers, the more the visual grammar settles into clarity and rhythm. In the above collage, we see locals walk with towering bundles of pots and leaves balanced on their heads. McKay captions it as – “Chattis on the way to the Bazaar”. The word Chattis, which refers to earthen pots, subtly begins to stand in for the men themselves. Their identities are effaced and their personhood, displaced by the objects they carry.
Though these images depict scenes of rural commerce and subsistence economy, they offer no names, no voices.
They are not incidental snapshots, rather are entries that subtly created a visual grammar in the archives over time. The people photographed become moving components and representatives of a daily life meant to be studied, classified, and preserved. Their labour is recorded, perhaps even admired, but their individuality remained outside the frame. Central yet depersonalised, they exist not as subjects, but as types, made legible for an external gaze.
As we flip the pages of these albums, the pattern deepens. Haimendorf turns a sharper lens on caste and community. In contrast to McKay’s “Paddy worker”, here we notice captions identifying “Cheruman woman harvesting paddy,” a “Paniyar man” using a woven rain shield.
His photographs come with categorical labels: caste names, community identifiers, functional titles. These labels index people within the rigid social hierarchies in Kerala. Here, the Kerala archive begins to shift from depicting people in action to defining types in action. This subtle transition from ‘bodies doing’ to ‘categories doing’ raises new questions: When does a person become just a representative? What is lost when (the generality of) a caste replaces (the specificity of) a name? These photographs bridge two modes of archival representation: people as active participants and people fixed into social categories.
People in, and as ‘categories’ in the colonial archive
McKay’s Photographs of local women
“Affrighted! Surprised!” – McKay’s captions for his photographs of local women are as jarring as much as they are revealing. Much like the uncaptioned image at the beginning of this essay, these women confront the camera not with passivity, or rather ‘Maiden Modesty’ as McKay puts it, but with expressions that signal disdain or resistance. Yet their gestures, caught and fixed by the lens, exist within a frame not of their choosing. These captions are far from neutral. They do not simply describe or record; they dictate and impose meaning. Their presence becomes visible through occupational markers, aesthetic judgments, or bodily posture, rarely through personal identity. In such framing, the photographic archive does not see them as individuals but as types that are classifiable and legible for a colonial gaze eager to catalogue difference. What emerges is a system of visual ordering and production of typologies.
This classificatory impulse becomes even more pronounced in Haimendorf’s ethnographic photographs.
Comprising 30 tightly framed portraits, this collage, drawn from his time in Kerala, presents an almost overwhelming visual taxonomy. Each image isolates an individual: a woman carrying a child, a bare-chested man staring into the lens, children smiling. None of these subjects is named. They carry the labels of caste: Irula, Nair, Muthuvan, Cheruman, Kurumba, and so on. In this flattened digital presentation of the archive, the specificity of lives is replaced by typological certainty. The visual consistency, the frontal poses, neutral backgrounds, and sharp resolution turn each individual into a representative category.
While Haimendorf’s handwritten field notes may contain richer context, the photographic register that survives and circulates today reproduces a system in which caste becomes the primary, and often the sole axis of identification. This results in a visual schema of social stratification in which the photographic gaze reinforces the logic of hierarchy, substituting personhood or lives lived with classification.
“A fine type of fisherwoman”
One image in the earlier collage stands out; its caption is revealing. “Fine” in what sense? Is it the physicality, attire, posture, or utility? This aesthetic judgement reduces the subject to a representational ideal of someone who fulfils, perhaps, a colonial vision of what a “fisherwoman of Kerala” should look like. It is not a photograph of a person, but of a type.
Unequal Visibility in the Archive
A collage drawn above from McKay’s extensive collection reveals images of local people that are occasionally accompanied by names, occupations, and a brief context.
Varughese “does it in style”. Rosario, the “head clerk,” has never taken a day’s leave in 39 years. Clemmy is marked as having “unusual intelligence and quality.” The annotations range from bureaucratic designations to personal impressions, with some names elevated alongside institutional titles like “deputy camp chief” or “district commissioner.” But these exist alongside another category entirely: unnamed figures, documented without annotation, filed simply under descriptors like “Seen by the Way”. Why are some individuals recorded with such specificity while others are relegated to obscurity?
This distinction between the named and the unnamed, the particular and the typified, is at the heart of colonial photographic practices. It invites us to ask: why are some individuals deemed worthy of names and biographical detail, while others are left as visual stand-ins for broader social types? This collage offers no answers, but it forces us, its viewers, to question the dissonances widely present in photographs.
The logic of viewing colonial photographs of Kerala is not simply about documentation. To look at these photographs is to confront the logic of classification, hierarchy, and selective recognition. Scattered across archives, the photographs remind us of a painful yet important truth: to be seen is not the same as to be known.
People of Kerala… dotting the scene
McKay and Haimendorf’s photos invite us to look beyond the foreground and focus on people who inhabit the margins of the frame – figures caught incidentally, passing by, or lingering quietly as part of the scene’s texture. They are not the intended subjects; they remain nameless, often overlooked, yet their presence is vital to the atmosphere and social context the photographs capture. They exist not as isolated portraits but as elements woven into a living, unfolding moment.
In one of McKay’s photographs, the lens rests on a serene vista of paddy fields and coconut trees. A local man stands in the foreground, blurred and left unnamed in the caption. If we removed him (image on the right), would the scene feel different? His presence is almost ghostlike; visible but not foregrounded; acknowledged but not framed as a subject. In contrast, another image shows McKay and a friend strolling through similar fields, captioned: “We look sweet beside a field of paddy.” Here, the photographer inserts himself boldly as subject and observer. Here, the photographer claims the scene openly, inserting himself as both subject and observer.
These differing modes of representation reveal how identity and presence are constructed in colonial archives. While the local figure remains a partial and peripheral appearance, McKay’s self-portrayal asserts control and belonging. This tension between background and foreground, between unnamed figures and self-representation, highlights the complexities of visibility and agency. It invites us to consider visibility, agency, and who gets to shape a narrative.
Self-Representation
The final pages of McKay’s album offer an instructive turn inward. Instead of unnamed villagers or ‘Mendicant Quacks,’ we see friends, family, and McKay himself. Under headings like “Bolghotty Personalities” and “Cochin Notabilities,” these figures receive titles that mimic the officialism of colonial documentation while playfully staging themselves within it. The very act of grouping these individuals into such categories implies a shared belonging, one that is both social and political, bound up in their residence within colonial compounds, golf courses, and clubs. These are not mere private mementoes; they are performative assertions of identity, capturing a colonial elite as they wished to be remembered. The lounging pose at the “Nineteenth Hole,” or the capture of “Cochin’s two Irishmen singing”, reflects a conscious curation of leisurely privilege, intended for circulation among peers.
Yet, within these self-directed tableaux, the camera’s frame cannot exclude what lies beyond its intended focus. Take, for instance, the two photographs captioned “McKay“ and “Sheppard“ under Bolghotty Personalities. In both, a child, presumably local, appears in the frame, their presence unacknowledged in the caption. These figures are not accidental; rather, they reveal a latent fascination among the colonial subjects to photograph themselves in proximity to the local (while denying them narrative agency). The latter’s exclusion from the captions does not erase their presence, but instead reveals a hierarchy of representational value. Colonial self-making thus unfolds not in isolation but through selective engagements with those who remain uncaptioned (the colonized).
To look at archival photographs of people in colonial Kerala is to explore a complex visual field shaped by power, purpose, and omission.
Some people are preserved as names, others as types, and many more as mere backgrounds. The choices made by Haimendorf and McKay to name or not name, to pose or to catch candidly, to categorize or to commemorate, still shape how we read these images today.
As viewers, researchers, and writers, we are not passive consumers of these images. In asking “who were they?” the primary purpose may not always be to find an answer, but to restore the ethical urgency of looking. Behind every caption (or its absence), is a person who lived, worked, loved, and was seen. Archival photographs may not always be a transparent window into our past. They are constructions, often partial and situated. But if we look carefully, and ethically, they can still offer glimpses of real lives – lives that mattered, even if the archive forgot.
