On the margins of the Indian Ocean:

Early goan photographers in Goa, Bombay and The East African Coast (1859–1900)

Abstract

This article analyses the practice and presence of photography in Goa, and by Goan photographers outside of Goa, from the 1850s to the 1900s. One of the aims of
this text is to draw a preliminary mapping of Goan photographic histories beyond
its most well-known chronologies and geographies – beyond Souza & Paul’s
photographic studio dominating visuality of Goa from the 1890s onwards and
beyond Goa itself.
To write a history of Goan photographers in this period – and not only of
photographers in Goa – means necessarily to leave Goa’s borders and address
questions of transnational and transimperial mobilities and diasporic identities.
Therefore, after an introduction where I map what I consider to be the main lenses
of analysis when approaching the subject, the article is divided into three parts
which correspond to three geographical spaces: the first one concentrates on Goa,
on the early traces of photographic practices before the 1890s, the date when
the photographic studio Souza & Paul publishes a catalogue of images for sale
and starts leading the local visual culture; the second and third parts analyse the
references to Goan photographers away from Goa, in two significant geographies
of the Goan diaspora – in Bombay (now Mumbai), a major city of neighbouring
British India, and in the East African coastline, across the Indian ocean.
My approach will entail crossing those physical and colonial borders that
were also crossed by photography and photographers, while also placing Goan
photographic practices within the wider history of photography in India and in
the coastal port cities of the Indian ocean. By doing so, it argues that the history of
photographic studios can also be analysed though the lenses of an Indian Ocean
history, one with thriving ports with cosmopolitan communities, and individual
and collective histories of mobility and migration. Mobility itself is a major
characteristic of 19th and 20th century professional photographers. This explains
the enormous quantity of photographers who make images of places that are very
far from their original places of birth. Goan early photographers are exemplary
of this need to go beyond national histories of photography and acknowledge the
diasporic characteristics of photography.