Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India

One. Death and the Rhetoric of Photography: X Marks the Spot

37 one Death and the Rhetoric of Photography X Marks the Spot Like the photographic image, the playing of an old hit song or the reading of letters written long ago also conjures up anew a disintegrated unity. This ghost-like reality is unredeemed. It consists of elements in space whose configuration is so far from necessary that one could just as easily imagine a different organization of these elements. Those things once clung to us like our skin, and this is how property still clings to us today. Nothing of these contain us, and the photograph gathers fragments around a nothing. —Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” X Marks the Spot Harriet Tytler, who, along with her husband, Robert, photographed many sites of the Sepoy Revolt, was born in India but, like many others, thought of herself as a foreigner to it. Yet as a small child (“a little over two years old”), when her mother was about to depart, leaving her in the care of her aunt and uncle, Tytler exclaimed to her mother, “Hum janta mamma chulla gia, chulla gia! [I know Mamma has gone away, has gone away].” It goes unexplained why this English child, who would grow up to give birth herself to another “foreign ” child in 1857, in the thick of the battle at Delhi, would speak in Hindi to her mother. Tytler elaborates, “I recollect that scene [of parting] perfectly; no one could comfort me, till I sobbed and sobbed myself to sleep again. Strange, I have no recollection of their coming back.”1 The memoir was written years later, after more traumatic partings from her mother—once when Tytler is sent off to England for school and again when the mother must leave Tytler in India as she herself quits India for good. It seems Tytler connects the repeated childhood trauma of being abandoned with the spontaneous utterance of a “foreign” tongue. Her own children, incidentally, also take up Hindi as their first language (“Mamma burra durram hai,” screams little Edith when the bathwater is too hot), along with a singularly aggressive attachment to death and the rhetoric of photography 38 their mother. For example, when traveling across war-torn Delhi in a cart during the Sepoy Revolt, Edith keeps fainting. Tytler devises a solution: “At last a bright idea entered into my head. It was a rather unique one, which was to scratch holes in my feet and tell her she must be my doctor and stop their bleeding. This process went on daily and for hours. No sooner did my wounds heal, when she used to make them bleed again for the simple pleasure of stopping the blood with my handkerchief. But it had the desired effect of amusing her for hours.”2 Earlier in the same paragraph, Tytler notes that the flies of Delhi “doubled and trebled from all the carcasses of animals and dead bodies lying about everywhere.”3 The startling passage about amusing her daughter Edith by allowing her repeatedly to make the mother’s feet bleed and then stop the bleeding crystallizes the intimate relationship between trauma and play: both function by means of repetition. For Tytler, the deep-seated fear of becoming a cadaver, a carcass like the ones she sees along the road, takes the form of asserting her own body’s living, bleeding, healing materiality and in turn the living activity of her own children.4 The disavowal of the contamination of Englishness with Hindi, which one sees in the colonial insistence on being a foreigner to the colony, is of a piece with the repression of death’s contamination of the living. In this vein it is instructive to examine Harriet and Robert Tytler’s photographs of post–Sepoy Revolt sites of conflict. For example, the photograph titled Humaion’s Tomb, Where the King Was Captured by Hodson (Figure 1.1), simply shows the tomb itself, and the photograph of the slaughter ghat in Cawnpore shows an empty space by the river where British civilians lost their lives (Figure 1.2). In Christopher Pinney’s reading of Robert and Harriet Tytler’s photography, he notes that given the technomaterial limitations of photography in the 1850s, photographers could record events only belatedly: “The stage, long empty, and in many cases metaphorically darkened, refuses to release its evidence of the event.”5 Unlike Felice Beato’s theatrical photography, the Tytlers’ work asks us to find in these photographs “a living historicity” that would...