Magnus Family in India

A colonial family record their travels as they holiday around north and eastern India

This intimate record invites us on a tour of 1920s India with the Magnus family. The film takes in the Victoria Memorial and Maidan in Calcutta and the exclusive Nedou hotel in Srinagar. It reveals the ways in which colonial life transplanted familiar British practices (such as picnics on the beach) to rather different conditions and contexts (the heat of the tropics requiring sola topis and shawls).

Made during an era of state reform and expansion in India that helped to make global travel more accessible to middle-class Britons, a film like this would have allowed the family to represent itself as worldly and urbane as well as serving as a memento of special times. The Magnus Family collection, donated to the BFI National Archive in 1977, consists of three 16mm films of the family's holidays around India and in Europe around 1927. Mr Magnus was part of the considerable British population in India at the time, an amateur filmmaker of no little talent - with a steady hand, a good eye and a genuine interest in local culture. Dr. Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS University of London)