Home Life

Join the Hunter family for a tour of colonial domestic life in 1920s north India in this three-part amateur film.

Made by an English family living in north India during the heyday of the Raj, this amateur film reveals the grandeur in which middle-class English colonials lived. It also lets us see how the labours of a large retinue of Indian servants helped to create the intimate spaces of ‘private’ family life, including the summer retreat to the hill station of Mussoorie.

In showing us their ‘home away from home’ the Hunters’ film gives no indication of the anti-British agitation that animated Indian politics in this period. The film was made in 1928, the year in which Indian leaders boycotted the British Government-appointed Indian Statutory Commission and began to draw up their own constitution for an independent India. Dr. Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS University of London)