BIO
Mallika Leuzinger

Mallika Leuzinger is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the History of Art Department at University College London. She has previously worked on cultural heritage and oral history projects in India and the UK, and at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. She holds a BA in History and MPhil in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge.

PROJECT
Dwelling in Photography: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia
2018

Durga Puja', Calcutta, c.1962-1965, photograph by Debalina Majumdar. Courtesy Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Kamalini Mazumder

My thesis examines amateur and domestic camera practices in South Asia over the last ninety years. It traces how the camera has been mobilised by unlikely actors in unexpected settings as an object of and catalyst for intimacy, amateurism and (women’s) empowerment, beginning with Cochin-based Haleema Hashim (1928-2017), and the Bengali twin sisters Manobina Roy (1919-2001) and Debalina Majumdar (1919-2012). All three photographed amidst a backdrop of decolonisation, the global Cold War, and the aspirations and anxieties of middle-class domesticity and femininity. Their images were deft and embodied engagements with household activities and objects, the children and women around them, and strangers and scenes encountered on travels to Britain and the Soviet Union in 1959-60. I attend to how these images slipped in and out of circulation within their families, amateur photography clubs and magazines, and are now gaining new audiences as the visions of ‘pioneering women’ and ‘glimpses of everyday life’ through custodian projects, which range from exhibitions in art galleries and museums to personal blogs and crowd-sourced digital archives associated with the subcontinent. Here, they intersect with contemporary initiatives premised on putting cameras in the hands of marginalised women, whose images are then sold and exhibited online. In emphasising the entanglements and points of friction between these ostensibly disparate case studies, it puts forward a gendered, phenomenologically charged and acutely (geo)political ‘little’ history of photography.

'Gleaner', Ramnagar, c. 1937-1938, photograph by Debalina Majumdar. Courtesy Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Kamalini Mazumder.

I am immensely grateful to The Palmquist Fund for supporting my research in India. The grant I received enabled me to interview the relatives of Haleema Hashim, Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy and study the photographs in their custody, to visit historic photography studios such as Krishnan Nair Brothers Colour Lab (est. 1910) in Cochin, and to explore materials carefully preserved at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (Mumbai), Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences (Kolkata) and Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (New Delhi).

'City lights', Piccadilly Circus, London, 1959, photograph by Debalina Majumdar. Courtesy Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Kamalini Mazumder.

Moscow, 1959, photograph by Manobina Roy. Courtesy Joy Roy.

Unknown location, c.1960s, photograph by Manobina Roy. Courtesy Joy Roy