A four-year project, Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs probed the history of photography as an ethnographic tool and deconstructed popular images of women, creating an “inventory” of hundreds of images. The work is divided into four parts: Native Types, The Ethnographic Series, The Popular Series, and The Process Series.

For this work, Pushpamala collaborated with Clare Arni, a British photographer who grew up in South India. A central reference for the work was the notion of the "Zenana" or all-woman studio in 19th century India, run by female British photographers, where women in purdah went, to have themselves photographed. The work presents an eccentric array of ‘native types’, re-creating characters from familiar sources, historical, religious and mythological, fictional, and real. While the artist's other photo performance works are intimate photo romances or studio portraits, Native Women is more elaborate, conceptual and abstract. It engages with theoretical interventions in such areas as women’s studies, anthropology, ethnography, the colonial and modern obsession with classification, political issues in art and photography, and the concept of ethnic identity as masquerade. On the other hand it is also more playful and humorous, allowing the collaborators to explore their common interest in the realms of kitsch, schlock, and excess.

The two women, each entering the project-space with a different cultural, racial and religious inheritance, play the protagonists in an ironic interrogation of both the colonial obsession with classification, and the Indian nationalist ideal of “Unity in Diversity”, using performance and masquerade borrowed from popular forms found in “costumes of India” pageants, Republic Day floats, festival tableaux and dioramas. The artifice of the posed studio photograph, with its elaborately created sets and costumes, becomes a site for fantasy to look at representations of South Indian women in the Indian imagination.
 
Playing with the notions of subject and object, the photographer and the photographed, white and black, real and fake, the images subvert and overturn each other. As the artists asserts, the importance of this project lies in the encyclopaedic range of images it throws up, and the range of cross references evoked – so that the work as a whole becomes its own archive of images.