This weekend, two exhibitions will highlight the Nilgiris’ history, and the ecology of the biosphere, shola grasslands, bees, and most importantly, the communities who have lived there through the centuries. The primary exhibition curated by Jenny Pinto, Remembering and Reimagining, was created to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the founding of Ooty, which was observed last year.
Jenny says the exhibition, commissioned by the Ooty Literary Festival in 2023 and produced by TNMAI (the Nilgiris Mountain Arts Initiative), took five months to curate. It comprises an annotated collection of over 300 photographs of the Nilgiri mountains that reflect the region’s ancient geological and ecological history, and the ‘fascinating indigenous tribes who lived for hundreds of years in harmony with the mountains, until the colonists arrived in the early 19th century and transformed the landscape ecologically, architecturally and culturally’.
“When the Europeans were in the Nilgiris, they kept a good photographic record of the region. Many pictures are with archives in Europe and in university archives in the US, so I sourced them from these archives. I also sourced many images from Christopher Penn, the great grandson of Albert Penn (an English photographer who lived in the Nilgiris from 1865 to 1924),” says Jenny, adding that the more contemporary photographs were from people who have researched and written extensively on the Nilgiris.
