J. & G. Hagenbeck's Indian Exhibition

J. & G. Hagenbeck's Indian Exhibition

c. 1903
14.00x
9.00cm

In Ali Raza's excellent book Revolutionary Pasts Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Tulika Books, 2022) there is this note from a police report in 1926: "A public meeting was held . . . under the auspices of the Nau Jawan Bharat Sabha to protest against the exhibition of Indian jugglers by Karl Hagenbeck, the famous showman of wild beats . . . L. Prithi Raj delivered a speech in which he said that they could not complain of the exhibition of Indians in a zoological garden in Berlin when they were treated like beats in their own country, for they had been made to crawl like serpents in Amritsar and had been shot like wld animals in the Jallianwala Bagh." (p. 115). Raza adds in an endnote (p. 147) that points to the insidious nature of these kinds of cards: "Though Hagenbeck had long been dead by this time, his reputation as one of the foremost exponents of human zoos and racist ethnography outlasted him."

[Original German title: J. & G. Hagenbeck's ind. Ausstellung.]