Photography in Colonial and Postcolonial India as an Agent of Cultural Dominance (original) (raw)

Photography in Colonial India

Renata Dohman ed, Empire and Art: British India, Manchester University Press, 2017

An Open University teaching text for a pioneering course on art and globalisation.

Notes on historiography of photographs from India

History Compass, 2023

Despite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather late and remain comparatively limited in number. However, the burgeoining scholarship in the field illuminates photography's role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, while also highlighting the global character of the medium that complicate the unmarked history of photography. Three intertwined historiographical threads are influential in narrating the colonial Indian camera cultures. The first thread emphasized descriptive histories, the second thread debated cultural essentialism, while the third thread inquired into myriad photographic genres to rethink colonialism. An inquiry into these three threads helps reflect on the intellectual scope of photographs from colonial India, while also directing to future archival and analytical possibilities.

Book Review: Nathaniel Gaskell and Diva Gujral, Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present

criticalcollective.in, 2020

In the nearly 200-year-old history of photography in India, critical tomes on photographic history and practice are relatively few. A few seminal volumes-Judith Mara Gutman's Through Indian Eyes, Christopher Pinney's Camera Indica and The Coming of Photography in India-were for a long time, the only comprehensive works on the subject, providing an imaginative account of its history and evolution in the subcontinent. More recently, with the increased currency of lens-based media and a focus on popular visual cultures, there seems to be a sudden proliferation of writing on India's photo histories, publics and practitioners. The latest such effort, Nathaniel Gaskell and Diva Gujral's Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present, is a summation of this accumulated research and writing of recent decades. Its project is not necessarily to make a new intervention, but to map a path through what has now become a rather crowded field. The authors accordingly adopt a synoptic view, hoping to flag larger topics and themes but within the ambit of an introduction to the study of the subject.

TRACING THE POLITICS BEHIND THE CAMERA IN INDIA: A Bird's Eye View —Derivations of form and context from each other(1850s-present)

Tracing the politics of the camera in India, from it's very arrival under the nose of the colonial power in 1859 to the present day of collectives and pop up workshops, is what this article intrinsically aims to do. Focusing more on form and context, instead of content, through access into the life worlds of photographers (professionals and amateurs) over time, questions of representation, reproduction, reality-construction, censorship, changing modes of power/patronage are thrown light upon as the 'instrument' has changed hands through the course of the century.

Photographing the Feminine: a study of women as subjects of photography in Indian history since late 19th century

Framing Women: Gender in the Colonial Archive (MARG), 2011

Photographing the Feminine This article examines the presence of feminine subjects in early photographic studios of India by analyzing some recent studies pertaining to the topic. Moving on from anthropometry's scientific examinations of races and tribes, the following approach focuses on studio practice of portraiture, and ties into my larger study of matrimonial photographs that are produced and widely circulated in the country today. The history of matrimonial photography today remains uncharted, yet it holds strong roots in visual practices of portrait painting and in photography that commenced with the arrival of the camera in India in the 1840s. The following study leads up to examining the changing phenomenon of femininity through the prism of the matrimonial photograph, which is a specific cultural product with 'visual currency', in terms of John Tagg's definition of 'items produced by a certain elaborate mode of production… distributed, circulated and consumed within a given set of social relations: pieces of paper that change hands, find use, meaning and a value in certain social rituals' (1988:164). Matrimonial advertisements in newspapers and the internet are more recent, post colonial phenomena that facilitate nuptial negotiations between families from impersonal, public sources. Their need was not felt previously when alliances were primarily sought through a more personal interaction, and recommendations through caste and familial references. The matrimonial photograph emerged to accompany matrimonial advertisements in the newspapers of post independence India, and they redefined the portrait of the single woman according to the specificities of this context and purpose. Following is an attempt to historically trace photographic conventions pertaining to women in studio portraits, which have to different degrees been assimilated into matrimonial photos today by negotiating innovation within convention. The purpose of the wider research on matrimonial photographs is to examine the role that it plays in the contemporary systems of kinship and social organisation in urban India.

‘REPRESENTING THE OTHER’ TODAY: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE LIGHT OF THE POSTCOLONIAL DEBAT (WITH A SPECIAL FOCUS ON INDIA)

Based on postcolonial theory and the deconstruction of the orientalist discourse, this article sets the problem of the representation of the ‘Other’ in photographic practice. A new form of orientalism seems to be guiding a large part of the cultural production today, where East is represented as polarized between darkness and light. By taking the example of representation of India, and analyzing the work of some contemporary documentary photographers who have worked on this country, the author tries to uncover the implications of this new discourse and finally advocates for an unorthodox use of the medium.

Embellished reality : Indian painted photographs : towards a transcultural history of photography

Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum Press, 2012

This book focuses on the Royal Ontario Museum's collection of Indian painting photographs, supplemented by works in other public and private collections. Through an examination of their physical qualities, and a review of primary documents and secondary literature, it lays out in broad strokes a sense of the genre's chronology and its place in the wider context of photographic practice. Instead of being a product of a uniquely Indian visual practice, I argue, painted photographs from India are part of a transcultural history of photography. They have been represented as unusual or remarkable not because of the circumstances of their historical production but because of the centrality of photographic indexicality today and the hegemonic status of the black-and-white photographic image in histories of photography. It is this, it seems, that has cast painted photographs as anomalies in the history of photography rather than as an integrated and integral part of its evolution.

Moving Pictures: Imagining the Past Through Courtly Photographs of British India

2016

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.