Seminar Urbaltour, Colonial Visual Cultures and the Representation of Hill Stations in South and South-East Asia

By Alexandra de Heering

On Friday Feb 9, a seminar on the colonial history of hill stations in South Asia and South-East Asia was held in Lyon III, EVS laboratory (UMR 5600). Organised by Alexandra de Heering, this seminar session aimed at exploring, through the study of picture postcard, the complex but fertile triangulation between colonial imperialism, photography and tourism. Till recently, picture postcards have largely been overlooked by the academia. These mass-produced and highly popular visual documents that circulated widely nevertheless constitute crucial sources to study popular representations and the colonial project. Interestingly, their heyday at the end of the 19^th century till the 1930’s coincided to what Kenny called the “hill craze” of the imperial age, but also to the development of tourism that heavily contributed to their popularity. Picture postcards, therefore, are visual and discursive narratives set in time and space. They need to be studied.

Our guests Omar Khan and Sophie Junge intervened about their work on picture postcards in – respectively – British India and the Dutch Indies. They presented and analysed the visual production and discourse on hill stations that was produced in British and Dutch Empires in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

Omar Khan presented his work online from Pakistan. In his presentation “Hill Stations of the Raj”, Omar insisted on the strong communication purpose of picture postcards associating text and image, so much so that he coins them as the first form of social media. He underlined the craftmanship the creativity behind the postcard production in those days. Omar analysed how hill stations (and most specifically – from East to West – Darjeeling, Simla and Murree, his favourite) were represented in a set of picture postcards stemming from his own collection that is now available online.

Through this set of images depicting mostly landscapes, urban areas and indigenous people, Omar explained how postcards – filled with typical colonial tropes and stereotypes – were colonial manifestations of a certain viewpoint. They contributed building certain ideas of hill stations and their indigenous people while corresponding to what people wanted to see, one feeding the other again and again. As a result of that, picture postcards participated propagating the core characteristics of colonial hill stations: domesticated nature, “europeanised” landscapes, unique architecture, technical endeavours, indigenousness, etc.

Omar Khan has contributed to the field with important publications among which:

– Omar Khan, Paper Jewels. Postcards from the Raj, Mapin/Alkazi, 2018.

– Omar Khan, From Kashmir to Kabul. The Photographs of John Burke and William Baker 1860-1900, Mapin, 2002

Sophie Junge made her presentation from Lyon, at EVS. Sophie started by introducing her singular approach to iconography. She is interested in how images were received and then circulated multiples times in archives and personal collections – insisting on the fact that each encounter renews the meaning(s) of the photographs. Sophie spoke about her previous research on the visual representations of Soerabaja cityscape, and underlined the importance of reflecting on the ongoing power and impact of the colonial postcards that continue diffusing the colonial ideology through always renewed channels of communication (for instance now social medias), and to implement a postcolonial reading of these.

Sophie then analysed a set of picture postcards of Tosari, the closest hill station to Soerabaja, and drew our attention to the different ways by which these uncommissioned postcards contributed to the narration of the Dutch colonial rule in the Indonesian archipelago as a success story. Picture postcards depict hill stations as under control, ordered and safe spaces (in rust en order, in peace and order) often shown from a higher standpoint. They need to be read in dialogue with representations of larger cities – which they form a kind of alter ego with –; large cities then were commonly depicted visually as unhealthy and sultry.

Sophie Junge’s latest publications are:

– Sophie Junge (ed.), “Den Blick erwidern. Fotografie und kolonialismus”, Fotogeschischte, Heft 162, 2021.

– Sophie Junge, Erin Hyde Nolan (eds.), Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe, Routledge, 2022.

The seminar ended with an interesting discussion with Omar and Sophie on the contemporary readings of these colonial postcards in the postcolonial context, and on the current reappropriations of the colonial visual discourse on hill stations. Both also elaborated on the visual roots of the colonial representations of the hills, stemming from depictions of European and Swiss hills and views, meant to filling European expectations.

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