ABSTRACT
If Company painting from the first half of the nineteenth century presents a standard, stable iconography for spinning, the ubiquity of this type of imagery fades in the second half of the century as the medium of photography takes over the role of recording the ‘everyday’. This chapter examines the image of spinning and the spinner in extant photographs from the midnineteenth century to the 1940s. In this analysis one sees a shift away from the depiction of action that we witnessed in the Company paintings from the Gangetic plain. Photography, as a new technology, was deployed to fix identity through the production of stable, static images of posed individuals or groups. This did not depend entirely on the new medium; the shift towards identity relates also to larger changes within colonialism on the subcontinent after the uprising of 1857-8. Like earlier Company paintings from Thanjavur and the Malabar coast, photography largely produced a typologisation of caste, tribe and profession. Spinning, unable to assist in defining these roles, almost entirely disappeared.
