India, Feb. 7 -- With a foreword by the pioneering scholar Christopher Pinney, Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India; 1855-1920 edited by Sudeshna Guha is a sumptuous volume with essays by academics Ranu Roychoudhuri and Suryanandini Narain and Omar Khan, author and researcher of early photography and ephemera of the Indian subcontinent. Guha's piece, which covers the development of ethnographic photography in India, dissects the impact of the creation of colonial typologies, while Roychoudhuri's essay focuses on the People of India volumes and the role played by the letterpress captions, the typologies it created and the reception of the volumes after they were published. Narain reflects on the ethnographic portraits of colonial households, focusing on the colo- nial biases that accompanied the documenta- tion of these domestic lifestyles. Khan's essay on Nautch girls addresses the dissemination, through postcards, of images of Indian female beauty....