Modes of Travelling in India

Black & white newspaper cutting titled-Modes of Travelling in India, from an 1863 ‘The Illustrated London News: images of people travelling on horse backs, on elephant, in palanquins, in bullock carts, on camel backs, travelling on foot and even crawling on all four limbs, as pilgrims sometimes do. All these images are hierarchically arranged to climax at the bottom in the image of a train with a group of ‘native’ observers on the side-lines. The hierarchic depiction of modes of travel in the illustrated London news points to an obvious colonial discourse of progress, it also hints at a logical culmination of all pre-industrial forms of travel into an ‘advanced’ industrial mode of travel, symbolized by the train.