Vasuki Shanmuganathan: “Authentic, new and rare Ceylonese? at the Zoo: Creating Racialized Images for German Colonial Pursuits, 1870-1910.”
In 1878 German impresario Carl Hagenbeck procured, from his brother-in-law Charles Rice, eight men and seven women simply listed as “Hindus” in the registries. They were to perform at the Hamburg Zoological Garden as “exotic people”. These “Hindus”, who worked as servants in London households, arrived in the port city of Hamburg wearing European clothing. They had to change into Indian attires, live in Bamboo huts and manage the six elephants that were part of a makeshift village set up in the zoo. The show was a financial disaster because the people on display had failed to convincingly perform the “exotic” for German audiences.
Five years later, “Ceylonese” people were brought to the zoo but this time from Sri Lanka for a better “exotic effect”. A ship containing 21 men, women and children, 21 elephants, 8 zebus, 6 ox carts and large collections of ethnographic objects departed from the port city of Colombo. The show was a success and ethnographic displays proved to be a lucrative venture on the European continent. In London alone 5 Million visitors went to see Sri Lankans in the zoo.
This paper will contextualize how the movement of Sri Lankans between the two continents contributed to the creation of racialized images in the German imaginary. I will then elaborate on how a vocabulary of race and ideas of “looking” reconfigured notions of colonial space at the ethnographic shows.
Biographical Statement:
Vasuki Shanmuganathan is a PhD candidate in the Collaborative Program in German and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include visual and literary productions of gender, colonialism and childhood in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Her SSRHC funded dissertation investigates the role of colonial Ceylon in German colonial pursuits and how it relates to constructions of German childhood and masculinity at the turn of the century.
