Three large mounted black and white photographs of the 'Lakhimpur Battalian, Assam Military Police', 1891, showing 'Gurkha Recruits' on parade, and officers with names.

Each of the three photographs measures roughly 19 x 23.5 cm, and each is mounted on a piece of card roughly 29 x 35 cm, with a decorative red border around the photograph. The photographs are lightly-faded but in good condition, on aged and worn mounts. Each mount is stamped in purple: 'Lakhimpur Battalion, | Assam Military Police'. In contemporary manuscript, in the bottom left-hand corner of each photograph is 'Dibrugarh | 18.6.91'. The first photograph, captioned 'Gurkha Recruits', shows a long line of men (38 in the front row), in uniform (the last eight in the front row in dark blazers), standin a field before a number of trees. The second photograph shows around 200 men on parade, in a square of ten rows, with a band to the side and an English officer on horseback and other officers at the head, and barrack huts and a tree behind. The last photograph is captioned 'Officers', and shows seven men (all Indians) standing, and three men seated (two British and one Indian). The ten individuals are identified in manuscript beneath the frame, with the two British officers named as 'Sub. P. R. Hughes' and 'Capt. R. M. Maxwell'. The Assam Military Police was founded in 1890, following the reorganisation of the Assam Frontier Police into five battalions: Lushai Hills, Silchar, Lakhimpur, Naga Hills and Garo Hills. In 1905 it was reformed yet again, this time as the East Bengal and Assam Military Police. The photographs derive from the papers of the anthropologist Jack Herbert Driberg (brother of the colourful Labour MP and gossip columnist Tom Driberg), whose father John James Street Driberg (1841-1919) retired from the Indian Civil Service in 1896 after thirty-five years in Assam.