Surjavo Sen Gupta discusses the use of medical and artistic tools as agents of colonial subjugation by considering the phrenological enquiry of the Toda people of South India.
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras… because nature has ceased to be what it always had been — what people needed protection from. Now nature — tamed, endangered, mortal — needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
Known for her women-centric tableaux performances, the Indian visual artist Pushpmala N. created the 2000-04 project Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs in collaboration with British photographer Clare Arni. The resulting work of over 250 images was classified into four sets: Native Types, Ethnographic Series, Process Series, and Popular Series (Sharanya 2019, 118). Here, selected images in the Ethnographic Series feature Pushpmala portraying an unnamed Toda woman, as she draws on the visual language of colonial-era anthropometric and ethnographic studies. The Todas are among the most ancient tribes of the Nilgiris district in Tamil Nadu and have attracted scholarly attention since the early 19th century due to their “ethnological aberrancy” compared to their neighbours (Emeneau 1984, 1).
One photograph from this series particularly stands out to me: only Pushpmala’s face is in the frame, with a pair of phrenology callipers (historically used by phrenologists to take measurements of the head) positioned to measure it.
Interestingly, the callipers here are held like a gun, which brings me to the central focus of my essay.
I shall demonstrate how medical knowledge — represented by disciplines like phrenology — and notions of empirical ‘truth’ were weaponized by the British to subjugate the Toda people and establish their ‘savagery.’ Pushpamala’s inclusion of this instrument becomes particularly significant since phrenology emerged as a scientific discipline in Europe around the same time to develop “a racialised hierarchy of populations which placed the European or ‘Caucasian’ type firmly at the top of the pile” through cranial assessments (Davie 2012, 11).
Phrenology and the ‘race’ question
Although the 19th-century practice of interpreting mental qualities and propensities by examining the exterior shape of an individual’s skull has now fallen out of repute, it is key to unpack how the British Empire transformed the concept of ‘race’ from a biological notion into a specific epistemic construct used to control its colonies. Phrenology understands the human skull as divided into broad groups of localized bumps or organs, each having a particular set of qualities that might relate to behaviour or character. For example, the organ of Combativeness was associated with “courage to meet danger and overcome difficulties,” but in its extreme expression, it could amount to a love of contention, including a “tendency to provoke and assault” (van Wyhe 2017, 74).
Johann Casper Spurzheim, who coined the term, insisted that for all the apparent fixity of an individual’s set of faculties, everyone had a certain capacity to modify the phrenological attributes they had been dealt at birth (Davie 2012). This notion sent ripples across the British Empire, because not only could Europeans be scientifically determined as superior, but phrenology could also enable the upliftment of the so-called ‘savage races’, once again feeding into the discourse that the British Empire had brought the gift of civilization to its colonies.
Furthermore, in spite of phrenology’s pretensions to being scientific and objective, the discipline largely resonated with audiences lacking specialised medical training. Edinburgh barrister George Combe came to be a key figure, arguing that factors such as variations in soil and climate were “altogether inadequate” to explain “national characters” (Davie 2012, 6), discrediting the significant role of ecology in shaping different races.
Colonial India hosted its own phrenological societies, including the Calcutta Phrenological Society, founded in 1825, which hosted lectures and produced research. George Murray Paterson, an assistant surgeon with the Bengal Medical Service in the mid-1820s and the mastermind behind a study based on local Bengali schoolchildren, advanced phrenology’s rehabilitative possibilities for the natives by asserting that imperial influence in the region had brought concrete benefits to the local population (Davie 2012; Poskett 2019). Indian phrenology would continue to develop throughout this century, promoted and debated by both white colonizers and Indian elites across various axes of the political spectrum – exploring and delineating racial categories in the subcontinent (Kapila 2007).
A phrenologist amongst the Todas
With this background, I will refer to the work of William E. Marshall — Lieutenant-Colonel of Her Majesty’s Bengal Staff Corps, amateur ethnologist, and avid phrenologist — who studied the Toda people. His work, A Phrenologist Amongst the Todas, explored the social anthropology of the Toda community, examining their origins, customs, and language through a phrenological lens.
Describing the Todas variously as ‘primitive’, ‘barbarous’, and ‘aboriginal’, Marshall attempted a phrenological enquiry over the course of a furlough he took in the Nilgiris region in 1870. He held the endogamous nature of the tribe responsible for “a crowd of individuals all of the same type” unlike the ‘civilised’ English lot with “an apparently endless variety of combinations of organs and temperaments” (Marshall 1873). Such assumptions led Marshall to commit a methodological error: his sample size for analysing the Todas was far smaller than what he would have used for the English.
Indeed, Marshall’s conclusions regarding the Toda people — such as his claim that “if caught young, he [the Toda person] should not prove as intelligent and as useful a member of society as the humble Ryot [peasant farmer] of India” — lose all veracity, being drawn from an evidentiary pool of merely eighteen males and females. This ‘empirical knowledge’ hinged on quantification, measurement, and abstraction emboldened colonialists to make similar sweeping conclusions about indigenous peoples — a sentiment which is perfectly embodied in Pushpmala’s imagination.
“Aim, Focus, Shoot”
In her insightful text On Photography (1977), Sontag observes that the verbiage used for operating a camera is identical to that used for firing a gun; there is aggression implicit in both acts. With this grounding, if we turn to Pushpmala’s ‘Toda H-26,’ the politics generated by the photographing device become evident: Pushpmala’s face set against a stark white background, her eyes fierce even in the vulnerable moment of having her head measured with phrenology callipers. This image is remarkable in that it manages to evoke a ‘gun’ connotation on two levels: the callipers measuring the dimensions of her skull as well as the camera operated by the invisible ethnographer. Pushpamala creates a double-layered critique of colonial subjugation, going beyond phrenology which has now been wholly discredited as a pseudoscience. For Pushpamala then, the camera itself becomes an important tool for subject-formation (I use “subject” here to refer to a distinct kind of subjugated body envisioned and manufactured by the colonial gaze).
Sontag remarks, “[photography] turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed,” attesting to the medium’s imperial potential. This notion finds historical resonance in the work of M. V. Portman, the “Officer in Charge of the Andamanese,” whose photographic practices served as a direct inspiration for Pushpmala’s Ethnographic Series.
Portman insisted that native bodies must be stark naked, and all “aesthetics” are to be avoided; “for ethnology, accuracy is what is required (1896). Delicate lighting and picturesque photography are not wanted; all you have to see to is that the general lighting is correct, and that no awkward placing of weapons or limbs hide important objects.” The clinical attention he devotes to staging these images decontextualizes the Andamanese from their lived reality, simultaneously harking back to disciplines like phrenology that were in vogue at the time. Additionally, his entire project to photograph the people has less to do with innocent documentation and more with the graspability of these subjects — a symbolic acquisition. Thus, Pushpmala’s deliberate choice to use photography becomes a veritable critique of people like Marshall, who justified his actions by claiming he was preserving the memory of the ‘fast dying out’ Toda people in the colonial archive. The latter echoes Sontag’s words: now that ‘nature’s children’ no longer pose a threat to the white colonizer, subjugation comes in the form of a camera, not a gun.
About the author
Surjavo Sen Gupta (he/him) is an MA student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research focuses on the intersections of visual culture, media studies, and social history, examining how artistic and institutional frameworks interact to reflect and influence cultural consciousness.
References
Davie, Neil. 2012. “Mapping the Racial Other: Phrenology, Race and Colonial Discourse in Britain, c. 1810-1850.” Published in French as “Garder la race en tête: Phrénologie, race et discours colonial en Grande-Bretagne, c. 1810-1850.” In Racialisations dans l’aire anglophone, edited by Michel Prum. L’Harmattan.
Emeneau, Murray Barnson. 1984. Toda Grammar and Texts. American Philosophical Society.
Kapila, Shruti. 2007. “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and beyond c. 1770-1880.” Modern Asian Studies 41 (3): 471–513. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4499790.
Marshall, William E. 1873. A Phrenologist Amongst the Todas, or, The Study of a Primitive Tribe in South India: History, Character, Customs, Religion, Infanticide, Polyandry, Language. Longmans, Green, and Co.
Portman, M. V. “Photography for Anthropologists.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 25 (1896): 75–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/2842469.
Poskett, James. 2022. Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920. University of Chicago Press.
Sharanya. 2019. “An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India.” Theatre Research International 44 (2): 118–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883319000014.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
van Wyhe, John. 2017. Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. Taylor & Francis Group.
