In 1908, French banker and patron of the arts Albert Kahn founded Les Archives de la Planète/Archives of the Planet as a depository for photographs and short films of everyday life in the contemporary world. Still located in Boulogne, near Paris, the archives include 72,000 autochrome slates and 183,000 metres of film produced between 1909 and 1931. In the context of the First World War and the interwar years, the purpose of this project consisted of using images to better understand the world and unite its people. These archives were also embedded in a larger network of institutions financed by Albert Kahn that were designed to build a sustainable model of world peace (Baldizzone 2002: 3). Kahn organised four missions to the East between 1914 and 1928. This chapter will more specifically focus on the footage shot in India between 1927 and 1928 by operator Roger Dumas, who was invited by Jagatjit Singh Bahadur – Maharaja of Kapurthala and a personal acquaintance of Albert Kahn – to photograph and film his golden jubilee in his princely state in Punjab (see Figure 10.1). Following this celebration, Dumas's journey through India continued to be mainly directed by various invitations from Indian dignitaries.

These films are located at the margins of the official colonial discourse and cinema in various ways, and as such they constitute a rare archival source to both complement and prompt a reassessment of existing colonial historiography. First, the films stem from the private endeavour of a French patron of the arts striving to avoid further military conflicts after the First World War and were not meant to directly propagate the official political message of the French government. Second, half of the territory in colonial India was directly governed by the British Crown, while the other half was governed by Indian princes or autonomous tribal councils. The films studied in this chapter focus on the princely states of India, which remain marginalised in the academic literature on the colonial era or are treated generally as unique spaces of British indirect rule (Copland 1997; Ramusak 2007). Third, a French operator shot this footage.