Live Act

The unsettling colonial history of India's Malabaris exhibited in human zoos/History

- S HARIKRISHNAN

On a cold autumn day in 1902, Parisians flocked to the Jardin Zoologique d'Acclimatation-Garden of Acclimatisation in large numbers to witness a spectacular installation of a gopuram, an entrance gateway to a Hindu temple typical of south Indian temple architecture. The installation was part of an ethnographic exhibition by the Hagenbeck brothers, titled Les Malabares-The Malabaris. It was one among various colonial exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that displayed non-European people and cultures from different parts of the world to entertain their European audience at home.

Established by a fishmonger, who bought and sold exotic fish in Hamburg in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hagenbeck company had, by the 1870s, grown to become the largest trader in exotic animals. Carl Hagenbeck inherited the company from his father and expanded the business, to procure "indigenous peoples" from all over the world for, as one record puts it, "presentation in highly profitable spectacles to European scientific societies and the general public." Humans became a visible part of such exhibitions in the nineteenth century, and, in central and eastern Europe, this trend peaked between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War. By the time the Malabaris were exhibited in 1902, Paris had seen many similar events. Particularly since 1877, when Carl Hagenbeck exhibited a group of Nubians from Northeast Africa in front of the animal stalls which proved to be a success.