‘I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together,’ sang The Beatles, but egalitarian notions of the self and the other are best left to hippie tunes. The coffee-table books that found their way to my desk, suggest otherwise. Itinerants – Mumbai’s nomads by Charmayne and David de Souza looks to wayfarers like circus performers, sadhus, doodhwalas and others who live their lives on the streets of India while Indian Life and Landscape by Western Artists documents sketches, paintings, cartograms created by English, French and Dutch artists. Each work documents a way of life or a land that either is lost or will soon be lost to us.

Charmayne and David’s book draws on transients and their migratory existence but removes them from their ‘exotic’ backdrop. Their subjects are photographed against a black, white or grey background. Devoid of a politicised landscape that would evoke commonplace beliefs of migrants, the focus in these photographs is on just them. Charmayne’s text which accompanies these images, while thoughtful on its own, negates the rationale of the work. It firmly plants these migrants back on the streets in a familiar land of stereotypes. David and Charmayne are no longer mere conduits or documenters but take on the persona of the outsider speaking for the marginalised or in postcolonial jargon, the ‘other’.

In fact Indian Life and Landscape by Western Artists seems to be more benevolent to the plight of the ‘other’. It isn’t a case of the empire striking back. The book takes no ideological position towards orientalism. Lacking a subjective voice, it seems more like a ‘recording’. Dense with information, it is also brimming with works of travellers and artists from the west, which were created as curios to send back home and display in opulent cabinets. Some are just picturesque images of a scene that was alien to a large part of the Occident. Some however were designed with a more insidious purpose… and the book in an umbrella sweep of India’s history lays bare both purposes. Propagandist works like Hendrick Cornelis Vroom’s Peaceful trading on the Indian Coast or blatantly misleading ones like Mather Brown’s Lord Cornwallis Receiving the Sons of Tipu Sultan as Hostages are documented here. In Brown’s work Lord Cornwallis calmly takes Tipu’s sons who look at the benevolent father figure lovingly while Tipu appears only slightly distressed, a far cry from the real event no doubt.

Mark Jones, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum which published this work believes that colonial concerns have little to do with the publication. “I think that some of them were just innocent recordings of say the Taj Mahal. We live in a pluralistic world now and people look at that colonial enterprise as exclusive but there has been imperialistic expansion in all parts of the world and this was 150 years ago. So in my opinion this doesn’t have much to do with that.” Capturing the complex and multifaceted subcontinent in self-serving ways played a large part in mapping colonised identity. But in a neocolonial world that thrives on assimilation, even biased recordings of waning diversity are welcome.

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