Dr Anisha Palat: "Animals, Photography and the Hunt in India"

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, the conquest of animal life became central to the visualisation of British identity and imperial power. This conquest was highlighted in photographs that staged British hunters over the bodies of dead animals, most often tigers. Drawing on such photographs and supplementary texts from diverse archival sources, this paper approaches photography as a critical site through which human-animal relations were staged under empire. The paper examines these photographs in a new light, shifting attention from the pride and triumph of the hunt, to instead look at ecological erasure through the death of the animal.

Dr Anisha Palat is an art historian whose research explores the intersections of visual culture, animals, caste, colonialism, and the environmental humanities in South Asia. She completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2024 and is currently a Heritage Collections Research Fellow at IASH. Her current research examines colonial-era hunting photography in India, exploring how photographic images mediated relationships between empire, animals, and the environment. This research is also supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust (2026) and the British Art Network (2025). Anisha’s first monograph, Aesthetic Ecologies: The Cow, Caste and Contemporary Art in India, is forthcoming in 2027 with Manchester University Press. Previously, Anisha was a Research Fellow at the Tamil Nadu Council of Historical Research. In January 2027, she will join Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, as a Research Fellow.

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