Photographing Madura: The Living Temple as a Site of Ruin

Abstract

In 1933, Edith Storrs offered a large donation of photographs from her family collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: “I do not want them,” she wrote in her letter, “as this house is not v[ery] big, but if you think that any of them are of interest now, & would care to look through them, I will gladly send them….” Captain Linnaeus Tripe, Storrs’ grand-uncle, was a photographer working for the East India Company's Madras Presidency in the mid-nineteenth century, and he produced many prints of the Tamil country in south India. With the arrival of photography in India during the 1840s, the expeditions of British soldiers and civil servants were recorded in extravagant albums with extensive annotations, which gave credibility to the imperial project and catered to the British public's craving for oriental travel narratives.