Moving Pictures: Imagining the Past Through Courtly Photographs of British India (original) (raw)

A little boy dressed in silken finery reclines on a takht of velvet coverings, an embroidered cap sitting askew on his head as his dark eyes look searchingly into the camera. Elsewhere, a young prince with formidable whiskers and a cunningly fashioned turban sits upright in an elaborately carved chair, a sword held casually to the floor in one hand, while his gaze wanders into the distance. In a different setting, four noblemen attired in similarly handsome headgear, flank a British officer sitting erect in his elegant uniform; while the others avoid the glare of the lens, one of the noblemen glances furtively into it. All three situations describe photographs of various members of the Indian aristocracy, taken during the British Raj. The images are of interest not just because of their compositional idiosyncrasies or the once-redoubtable standing of their subjects, nor even because of some vague, generalized notion of their historicity. If anything, it is a combination of all three, and more, for these photographs, and hundreds of others like them, are neither simply frivolous souvenirs of their own time and space that have no meaning in a post-modern world, nor are they some bloodless ‘document’ of Indian history whose resonance is confined to that definition alone. What they are is a potent and eloquent connection to a past that is both integral to the South Asian identity, as well as almost alien and inaccessible to it.