The Marshall Albums

The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts is a registered charitable trust based in New Delhi. It is primarily dedicated to the exploration and study of the cultural history of India.

Over the last 30 years, Ebrahim Alkazi, the Foundation’s Chairman, has amassed a private collection of photographs known as Th e Alkazi Collection of Photography (www.acparchives.com), an archive of nineteenth- and earlytwentieth century photographic prints from South and South-East Asia, amounting to over 90,000 images.The core of the Collection comprises works in the form of photographic albums, single prints, paper negatives and glass plate negatives from India, Burma, Ceylon, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet. Almost every region with a history touched by the British Raj is represented. Th ese vintage prints document sociopolitical life in the subcontinent through the linked fi elds of history, architecture, anthropology, topography and archaeology, beginning from the 1840s and leading up to the rise of modern India and the Independence Movement of 1947.

The photographic archive has been digitally catalogued and documented, and is accessed by researchers, curators, historians and teams of scholars. Th e material is now being made available to a larger academic community and the general public through a series of publications that are accompanied by exhibitions and seminars. Each volume, under the editorship of a specialist in the fi eld, examines a particular region or topic represented in the archive, encouraging cross-disciplinary approaches and interpretations.

Sudeshna Guha is Affi liate Lecturer in South Asian History at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge (U.K.). She holds a Ph.D in archaeology from Deccan College, Pune, and has curated the photographic collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge) for over eight years. She researches on notions of historical evidence through histories of archaeology and photography.

Michael Dodson is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Tapati Guha-Th akurta is Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London.

Robert Harding is Senior Research Fellow for ‘Civilisations In Contact’ research project, Cambridge.

B.D. Chattopadhyaya is retired Professor of of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi