Daniel Rycroft

Santalism: reconfiguring 'the Santal' in Indian art and politics

At Kalamati, I managed to find a splendid type of Oraon [an adivasi or indigenous community in Chota Nagpur] .... I took his measurements with compasses and made a little plan of his features .... Too late I realised what a mistake I had made· ... terror seized him. Just as I was about to begin the head he said to the. guard that he had a call of nature, slipped behind the tree. and vanished for ever. The police gave chase but we never saw him again.

After-Images: Visual Cultures and Subaltern Pasts

In February 1856, the Illustrated London News published a wood-cut print of Sido Murmu, a captured leader of an anti-colonial rebellion in India led by indigenous Santal headmen. Known as the Hul, this movement has been re-visited by exponents of subaltern historiography in an effort to understand insurgent consciousness, and the parameters of ‘minority’ history. Working across these parameters, this article employs a visual and historical ethnographic methodology, in order to question whether the interplay between colonial-era and post-independence representations of the Hul may inform a new understanding both of British scopic regimes and of Santal (tribal) and Adivasi (Indigenous) assertion in India. The concept of ‘after-image’ is used metaphorically, to trace how a seemingly imperialist portrait of Sido Murmu has assumed multiple afterlives. I question how these afterlives intersect with the intangible heritage of the Hul especially in the new state of Jharkhand (eastern-central India), to generate an approach to heterotopian encounters that has applicability in both visual studies and subaltern studies.