In 19th-century urban India, soon after the development of the independent bungalow as a living space, the interiors of homes were used for public statements on taste and ownership, helping owners amass what sociologist Bourdieu (1977) has called ‘cultural capital’.1 The display of the photograph in such domestic spaces coincided with significant familial and spatio-temporal changes. Urban professions, emergence of the nuclear family, the growth of photo studios as well of the demarcation of public areas such as the drawing room within the residential space led to an interest in displaying not only family photographs but also chromolithographs and oleographs of English landscapes and of the Hindu and Christian pantheon (see Chaudhuri, 2012, on the emergence of the modern drawing room in upper-class Bengali homes). In Anglicised homes, while cabinet-size photographs in elaborate frames adorned mantelpieces and tables, the carte-de-visite and the family album were more for restricted viewing. Deborah Chambers makes a further distinction—family photographs ‘are seemingly static or unchanging texts’; when displayed in albums, ‘they are sequenced by narratives which structure meanings according to the passage of time and events, or act as visual family trees’ (Chambers, 2020, p. 100).