In the second half of the 19th Century, photography became one of the British Empire’s most persuasive instruments for knowing – and classifying – India.

A new exhibition – called Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India, 1855-1920, and organised by DAG, the Delhi-based art gallery – brings together nearly 200 rare photographs from a period when the camera was deployed to classify communities, fix identities and make India’s complex social differences legible to the colonial government.

Spanning 65 years, the exhibition maps an expansive human geography: from Lepcha and Bhutia communities in the north-east to Afridis in the north-west; from Todas in the Nilgiris to Parsi and Gujarati elites in western India.

It also turns its gaze to those assigned to the lower rungs of the colonial social order – dancing girls, agricultural labourers, barbers and snake charmers.

These images did not merely document India’s diversity; they actively shaped it, translating fluid, lived realities into apparently stable and knowable “types”.

Curated by historian Sudeshna Guha, the exhibition centres on folios from The People of India, the influential eight-volume photographic survey published between 1868 and 1875. From this core, it expands outward to include albumen and silver-gelatin prints by photographers such as Samuel Bourne, Lala Deen Dayal, John Burke and the studio Shepherd & Robertson – practitioners whose images helped define the visual language of that time.

“Taken together, this material tells the history of ethnographic photography and its effect on the British administration and the Indian population, in a project which in size and depth has never before been seen in India,” says Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG.

Here’s a selection of images from the exhibition:

A co-founder of online fashion giant Asos died after falling from a high-rise apartment block in Thailand, police have said.

Quentin Griffiths has been named by Thai police as the man found dead on the ground in the eastern seaside city of Pattaya on 9 February.

A police investigator told the BBC Griffiths, a British passport holder, was by himself, his room was locked from the inside, and there was no trace of any break-ins at the time of the death. An autopsy did not reveal any evidence of foul play.

Griffiths co-founded Asos in 2000 and remained a significant shareholder after leaving the firm five years later.

[BBC]

A Japanese city has received a hefty donation to help fix its ageing water system: 21kg (46lb) in gold bars.

The gold bars, worth an estimated 560 million yen ($3.6m; £2.7m), were given last November by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, Osaka Mayor Hideyuki Yokoyama told a press conference on Thursday.

Home to nearly three million people, Osaka is a commercial hub located in the Japan’s Kansai region and the country’s third-largest city.

But like many Japanese cities, Osaka’s water and sewage pipes are ageing – a growing cause for safety concern.