Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859-2006

by Stuart Blackburn, Michael Aram Tarr

This is the first visual history of Arunachal Pradesh, a state in northeast India bordering on Tibet/China, Burma and Bhutan. Based on archival and field research, it illustrates a century and a half of cultural change in this culturally diverse and little-known region of the Himalayas.

More than 200 photographs, half archival and half contemporary, reveal that tribal cultures in this remote mountainous region have been continually reacting to external forces and initiating internal innovations.

The Introduction places the archival photographs in their wider context, emphasising the complexity of the colonial encounter and uncovering personal stories behind many of the images. The sequence of photographs, juxtaposing the historical and the contemporary, shows us the uneven and sometimes confusing mixture of past and present that is emerging in Arunachal Pradesh.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Born in the US, first went to India in 1970 as a Peace Corps volunteer. PhD from Berkeley in 1980 on Indian folklore, taught at Berkeley, Dartmouth, Heidelberg, Humboldt (Berlin) and mostly at SOAS in London, where I moved in 1994. Now live in Hove, with my wife, on the south coast. I love historical fiction, not ancient stuff, mostly early to mid 20th century. Novels can bring history alive and help us to understand the past.