Oscar Mallitte's Andaman Photographs, 1857–8

Fig. 1.

'Remains of the Old Settlement, Port Cornwallis'. Engraving after photograph by Oscar Mallitte. In Frederic J. Mouat, Adventures and Researches, London, 1863, facing p. 100.

At the end of 1857 the French photographer Oscar Jean-Baptiste Mallitte (c.1829–1905) left Calcutta with a British expeditionary party. Its brief was to survey the Andaman Islands and decide where best to establish a penal colony. Mallitte took a series of 'photographic drawings' while there, the first ever photographs of the Islands. On the return of the party to Bengal several dozen copies of the images were printed and mounted, but subsequently they slipped from archival view and until recently were assumed lost. However, copies of most of the photographs have now been found in the Queen's Collection at Windsor Castle. A new curator of photography was working her way through the archives when she came upon them. The set as a whole was both unsigned and unattributed, but because each photograph had a separate title that correlated with place names and printed textual records, she understood their provenance immediately.¹ The eleven images comprise: 'Port Cornwallis'; 'Remains of the Old Settlement, Chatham Island, Port Cornwallis'; 'Native Hut, Chatham Island, Port Cornwallis'; 'The Volcano, Barren Island'; 'One of the Labyrinth Islands, Group of Burmese Convicts'; 'Port Blair'; 'Ross Island, Port Blair'; 'Implements and Weapons of the Andaman Islanders'; and 'Three Views of John Andaman (a native of one of the Islands)'.² (These last three were probably taken after the party returned to Calcutta.) The collection lacks just two of the originals: 'Watering Cove, Blair Island' and 'Blair Harbour, North Shore'.³

The Mallitte photographs raise a series of interesting questions, for they produce visually something of the pre-colonial landscape and culture of the Andamans in the last months before permanent British occupation of the Islands. Most particularly, they represent photographically for the first time an Islander: a man the survey party kidnapped and forcibly removed to Calcutta, with a view to showing him the supposed benefits of 'civilization' and learning something of Andamanese culture. When he fell seriously ill, it returned him to the Andamans, its initial concern that he would prove a conduit for knowledge of colonial superiority superseded by the hope that he would survive.⁴ Later on, Mallitte's photographs of him were copied, and widely published as lithographic engravings. These images are already quite well known, but the insertion of the original photographs into the visual frame now allows us for the first time to interrogate some of the slippages that were implied during the transformation of the limited-edition photographs into mass-circulated engravings. This paper will show that the photographs are of significance in this respect in three ways. First, they enable us to examine the underlying violence of colonization. Second, they demonstrate some of the ambiguities around the use of forced convict labour as a means of colonial expansion. Third, they reveal some of the ways in which the pre-colonial Islands and peoples were constructed and represented both discursively and visually through the trope of colonial 'tropicality'. As such, the photographs and engravings – together with their associated written texts – constitute a significant part of the imagined geography of the Andamans as a conceptual space, culturally and environmentally distant, different, and distinct from the British metropole, and ready to receive the supposedly civilizing benefits of colonization.⁵

By the middle of the nineteenth century, having abandoned a disastrous earlier attempt at occupation during the 1790s, the Government of India began to develop plans to colonize the Andaman Islands. Dating from Marco Polo's travel writing in the thirteenth century, there was a widespread belief that the inhabitants of the Andamans were at best savages and at worse cannibals. From the end of the eighteenth century, the significance of eastward sea routes through the Bay of Bengal grew. Correspondingly, so did the frequency of Andamanese attacks on distressed seamen and passengers. In 1855 the Commissioner of neighbouring Arakan, Henry Hopkinson, wrote of his astonishment that the Islands 'should be...