Visual Histories

Description

Not much is known about how the coming of photography changed visual discourse or affected people’s lives. This volume documents such a history through photographs and the history of photographs in India. Divided into two sections, the thirty-two essays, illustrated with archival photographs, look at the camera in the colonial era and in post- Independence India. The fi rst section looks at photography through ‘The Colonial Eye’— with the camera and the studio becoming necessary prostheses in the new engagement between the colonized and the rulers in the nineteenth century. Europeans—of whom the British were the largest in number—were the initial users of the photographic studio and early studio images of the sahib—civil servant, lawyer, tea planter, missionary, and so on—are among the fi rst available visuals. Soon, the memsahib appeared at the sahib’s side with or without selfconscious offspring. From around the end of the 1850s, as the Indian urban middle class started patronizing photographic studios, these became instrumental in fracturing notions of space and visibility: where the use of public space was governed by the discriminatory practices of race and gender, the photographic studio became a shared locale. ‘Imaging India’, the second section of the volume, looks at some such moments as well as takes the viewer to Independence and the years beyond.