Afterimage of Empire: Photography in nineteenth-century India by Zahid R. Chaudhary (review)

Soon after India became a colony of the British, it became a favoured destination for painters, lithographers and itinerant travellers—both men and woman, often emboldened with sketch pad and pencils. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the camera entered the stage of visual representation and had, as Zahid Chaudhary argues in his rather dense and semiotically arcane book, “irreversible effects on the modern formation of the senses.” The aim of his book, the author writes, is “to analyze those genres of colonial photography in which the historical specificity of loss and nostalgia melds seamlessly with the nostalgia that underwrites photographic practices themselves” (24). It is this nostalgia or varied understandings of nostalgia that are rather interestingly pointed out by the author in the opening pages of his book. The camera becomes an agent of nostalgia (and one can think of many other emotions as well) as with succeeding generations of viewers many different aspects and details present themselves. The photograph is there to be read and reread, such readings varying under different historical conditions and world views. Chaudhary comments perceptibly that “the photograph shows too much, in fact more than we can see, and by the same logic, something we cannot apprehend is inevitably present in every photograph” (9). And so on.

One does not have to be a committed theoretician to accept that a photograph is in fact an object of engagement; its existence is not innocent, just as the act of taking it was not innocent. To illustrate this point, Chaudhary introduces us to the photographs of the survivors of 1857, Robert and Harriet Tytler, where empty, desolate spaces represent death and horror. In an image of “Humaion’s [Humayun’s] Tomb where the King was captured by Hodson,” the tomb is off centre, and an unattractive foreground dominates the image. This is deliberate, writes Chaudhary, a way of conveying capture and subjugation. Did the Tytlers see it in this manner, one wonders, or is it just that it was only possible to photograph the tomb from such a position; there may have been obstacles such as unruly undergrowth or boulders in the way of doing a more traditional image, with the tomb neatly in the centre, with less foreground. Who knows? However, at the end of the day, the image as it is allows the author to give it a meaning that he wishes it to have. And we are free to disagree.

Chaudhary’s semiotic quest continues in an exploration of Felice Beato’s photographs of 1857, where bones and corpses were exhumed with impunity to give credence to images; here, the viewer did not have to dredge too far to come up with an expected understanding of the battering of Sikandra Bagh in Lucknow, the siege of the Residency, rebels being blown from the mouth of cannons or hanging from gibbets and so on. Beato clearly did the job that he had come for with great skill and aplomb.

But British visualists were more than mere recorders of blood and gore. The nineteenth century was also a time of exploration, of mountaineering and adventure and of expanding notions of the picturesque and the sublime. In “Armor and Aesthesis,” Chaudhary looks in some detail at the amazing landscape photography of that arch-racist, Samuel Bourne. The tradition of the “views of India” genre was continued by Raja Deen Dayal, well trained in the available vocabulary of the picturesque and the pleasing. However, the author is quick to point out that Indian photographers were not entirely mimetic in their practice—there were exceptions such as the well-known portraitists of Lucknow, Abbas Ali and Ahmed Ali Khan.

Chaudhary’s intentions of not only analyzing colonial photographs from a present-day perspective but also trying to understand the mindset and mandate of the photographers—whether they were commissioned to do so like Felice Beato or chose to memorialize like the Tytlers—are valid. However, more often than not, he tends to get...