ABSTRACT
During the 18th and 19th centuries, with the expansion of British commercial and territorial interests throughout the world, the establishment of colonial enclaves within tropical colonies served purposes like cantonments for the army, plantations for large-scale production of cash crops, supply stations for cheap labour and hill stations for British civilians and officials. These hill stations were special British conclaves which were landscaped from native terrains in order to make them conform to their ideal of picturesque beauty. Accordingly, Darjeeling, as one such hill station, came up in the early 19th century from the areas bordering the north of colonial Bengal as a landscape created for the British to recuperate and conserve their Saxon energy and race. The mapping of this newly acquired territory also involved the auxiliary scientific activity of ethnographically profiling the native population. The ethnographic profiling of the hill tribes was an undertaking with an epistemological agenda. The scientific and empirical temper of the 19th century of unmitigated seeing and showing had consequences for the domains of both art and anthropology. This chapter charts the transformation that came about in ethnographic illustrations of native people in the 19th century with the coming of photography.
