ARTICLE
Maurice Vidal Portman (b. 1860; d. 1935)
Scholars have argued that Portman’s mode of colonial intervention served to ‘tame’ rather than to ‘civilise’ and that he kept his subjects like semi-domesticated pets, which he viewed as savage but docile. This attitude partly stemmed from his vehement opposition to the sanctioned practice of cultural ‘improvement’ of the colonised and partly from his desire for authenticity in his photos. His persistence in the face of several challenges posed by the tropical climate, disease, logistics and the sheer scale of the operation, however, begged a deeper analysis of his less-apparent motivations. Some scholars suggest that his stylistic choices reveal his uneasy commitment to discipline, while the photographs themselves imply an underlying homoerotic tendency.
In his obituary in The Times of London, Portman was dubbed the “Father of the Andaman Islanders,” and was feted as a dauntless adventurer, scrupulous investigator and record-keeper. Although he has been prolific in the work he produced, there is little information available on the man himself. His few scattered texts and famous photographs remain the only sources of available insight. In recent decades, his extant plates and notes, now scattered across collections — such as of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and British Library, London, UK — have come in for a more critical evaluation. One such critique that reimagines and challenges the framework in which Portman operated is the work Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–04) by Pushpamala N and Claire Arni.
Bibliography
British Museum "Maurice Vidal Portman." Accessed February 19, 2021. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG127295
Desmond, Ray. "Photography in Victorian India." Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 134, no. 5353 (December 1985): 48–61.
http://www.jstor.org.ezprox.bard.edu/stable/41374078
Falconer, John. “Ethnographic Photography in India, 1850–1900.” The Photographic Collector 5, no.1 (1984–85): 16–46.
Gaskell, Nathaniel, and Diva Gujral. Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2018.
Pinney, Christopher. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.
Sen, Satadru. "Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M. V. Portman and the Andamanese." American Ethnologist 36, no. 2 (2009): 364–79.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27667567