Hariot Lady Dufferin (1843-1936) accompanied her husband to India during his Viceregency (1884-1888). While there she took up photography as a leisure activity in order to capture for posterity views of a country she greatly admired. This essay examines, from a post-colonial perspective, her private collection of photographs, encompassing landscapes, people, imperial acquisitions and more personal spaces. Using a Foucaultian argument, it considers how these photographs help to define the Vicereine's subject position, as an upper-class woman at the very centre of British rule in India, who was both surveyor and surveyed: she was privileged, yet, owing to the confines of gender, unable to express in written form any views on the affairs of state. Photography, however, offered her a useful visual language through which she could engage with the discourses of empire.
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