Photography in nineteenth-century India
Afterimage of Empire is a rich and thought-provoking study of early colonial photography in the Indian subcontinent, drawing on extensive theoretical observations and interdisciplinary methods. The book, born out of Chaudhary’s doctoral dissertation at Cornell University, contributes to scholarship on Indian colonial photography notably developed in J. Gutman’s, J. Falconer’s and C. Pinney’s works. Rather than proposing a descriptive historical account of photographic practice, this book explores the role of photography in the way people sensed (and made sense of) the world in history and inquires its social implications in the modern world. As the author explains in the introduction, the primary focus of the book is “what the colonial history of the medium [photography] may have to teach us about the making of modern perceptual apparatus, of the links between perception and meaning, and of the transformation of aesthetic experience itself”.
Interested in how this particular media is influenced by history and, in turn, influences history, Chaudhary starts his ambitious investigation with the arrival of photography in India (about the same time as it develops in Britain) and divides his argument into four thematic chapters, each relying on different material and exploring particular aspects of colonial photographic practices.
Chapters one and two are both devoted to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and its echoes in colonialist photography. In chapter one, “Death and the Rhetoric of Photography: X marks the spot”, Chaudhary studies post-Rebellion photographs by John Dannenberg and Harriet Tytler who memorialize British loss and death by reproducing in pictures the now empty spaces where tragic events had taken place, thus repeating patterns of traumatic shock. Chaudhary here addresses the “indexical” power of photography, which persuades us that the things photographed did really take place, in showing that photography is allegorical (and polysemic), and works along the same dynamics as those of rumour. Despite its assumed objectivity, the author argues that the photographic media is in fact a technology of propaganda which does not provide any narrative in itself but needs “captions”; here colonialist ones.
In chapter two, “Anaesthesis and Violence: a colonial History of shock”, Chaudhary continues his analysis of post-Rebellion photography through the work of commercial photographer Felice Beato. In pictures of unearthed bones and hung rebels, Chaudhary sees what he calls, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a “phantasmagoric aesthetic”. As the author argues, photography participates in the “dialectics of (in)visibility” which enable the viewers to experience the violence of their own destruction and transform it into a commodity. This process, which compensates the bodily shock of modernity and negotiates relations of domination by “managing” the colonized, is, for the author, symptomatic of a change in colonial ordering and “governmentality”, to borrow Foucault’s words. Here, Chaudhary argues that photographic practice has a crucial role in the production of colonial knowledge and is instrumental to colonial governmentality: it perceptually alienates the colonials and the colonized and justifies the ideology of the colonial state’s civilizing mission.
Chapter three, “Armour and Aesthesis: The Picturesque in Difference”, examines the picturesque aesthetic and the nostalgia for home that unfolds in Samuel Bourne’s landscape photography in the 1860s. By converting the Indian landscape into the familiar through the resort to picturesque conventions, colonial photography reveals a perceptual change insofar as the world was increasingly appreciated as “picture-like”. This chapter also investigates the works of Indian photographers Lala Deen Dayal, Darogha Abbas Ali and Ahmed Ali Khan and their adoption of the picturesque aesthetic. Instead of seeing traces of resistance in photographic practices, Chaudhary emphasizes the differences displayed in Indian photographs by reading them as attempts to mould themselves in the terms of English picturesque conventions, while the continued invocation and re-adaptation of local artistic traditions are considered as examples of the evolution of Indian aesthetic expressions.
In chapter four, “Famine and the Reproduction of Affect: Pleas for Sympathy”, Chaudhary explores the role of photography in stimulating emotions and sympathy especially through photographs taken by Captain Wallace Hooper during the Madras famine in the late 1870s. The author argues that such photographs enabled an identification with others that shaped English subjects through a sense of belonging to a “benevolent nation”, and thus served social cohesion.
In Afterimage of Empire, Chaudhary impressively juggles both theoretical and historical material. Photographic evidence is also always echoed by other contemporary sources like travel writings, memoirs, or newspaper articles which render the narrative lively. The author’s detailed studies are insightful; chapter three and the analysis of the work of Indian photographers – notably his investigation of albums containing blanked “photographs” of pardanashin women – are particularly captivating. Chaudhary’s arguments, choice of examples and selection of photographs, compiled in a glossy edition, render the book an engaging read. The reader may find the author’s theoretical explanations relying on specialized jargon hard to follow, and a proper conclusion, rather than a brief coda, would have helped bring together the different aspects addressed in the book. Moreover, while Chaudhary certainly emphasizes the importance of history and of historical determination in his study of the phenomenological impact of photography in the late nineteenth-century, there is relatively little detailed analysis of the photographs reproduced and of their historical context. More attention to the context in which those photographs circulated as well as to the intentions of the photographers, and to the reception and use of photography by various audiences would have further enhanced the study. Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire is nonetheless an extensive study which undoubtedly opens up reflection not only on the role of photography in the Indian subcontinent but on the cultural and sensorial changes brought by modernity both in the Western and non-Western worlds.
Eve Tignol, Royal Holloway University of London (eve.tignol.2012@rhul.ac.uk)