Lascars through the colonial lens: reconsidering visual sources of South Asian sailors from the twentieth century

Abstract

Photographs often accompany scholarly work on the role of South Asian seafarers in the twentieth-century maritime world. In most cases they are derived from a collection of commercial souvenir photographs taken on board passenger liners by a company called Marine Photo Service (MPS). This photograph collection is held at the National Maritime Museum in London and some MPS images are available online. However, using these commercial images without putting them in context obscures further understanding of the history of South Asian seafarers. Following Elizabeth Edwards's observation that museums all too frequently use photographs as wallpaper to frame historical narratives without interrogating the images, this article contrasts MPS images of seafarers on P&O's Viceroy of India with private photographs and ship plans. It interrogates images of South Asian seafarers to explore the social relations captured in them, in order further to understand the potential of image use in historical research and in museums.