An Archive of Their Own

This is a unique collection of images, spanning across centuries and continents, from the personal and professional albums of the circus community in the Indian subcontinent, embodying both personal memories and global histories. Curated with historical, aesthetic and emotional sensibility, each photograph is either a touching moment or breathtaking action frozen in time, clicked by colleagues, friendly strangers or professionals assigned by the company. These photographs, from the early twentieth century to the present, showcase the many layers of the spectacular and everyday circus lives of animals and humans. This book offers a fascinating visual journey through an extraordinary life world, bridging a lacuna in the remembrance and archiving of subaltern pasts.

Nisha P R is a historian and the author of Jumbos and Jumping Devils: A Social History of Indian Circus (Oxford University Press, 2020). She has been a Fulbright fellow at Yale University, Mellon-SSRC fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, a Research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, and the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University.