Afterimage of Empire: Photography In Nineteenth-Century India by Zahid R. Chaudhary (review)

Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth Century India studies the aesthetics and philosophical meanings of photography within the context of 19th-century colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. Key to this period is the revolt of 1857, and Zahid Chaudhary begins by offering a rigorous analysis of how this event impacted colonizer imaginaries of the colony and how those were transacted in Indian photographers’ practices. This revolt, while successfully suppressed, provoked a deep anxiety within the colonial establishment, spiraling further the colonizer/colonized, self/other binaries. This becomes the basis of Chaudhary’s phenomenological study of photographs from this time. Very early on the text situates the philosophical postures that shape his readings. Chaudhary is geared to analyze how history permeates embodied experiences of modernity, here specifically colonialism and the visual regimes it engendered. This is a very crucial move in the field of South Asian and postcolonial visual studies. Chaudhary draws from Walter Benjamin’s wide oeuvre, which takes up Marx’s concepts such as commodity fetishism, while at the same time resisting the obvious economic determinist line as exemplified in the Frankfurt School scholarship, particularly surrounding mass culture. Chaudhary’s invocation of Benjamin is two-fold. He takes up Benjamin’s key argument that perception is shaped in relation to history and changes alongside it, not abstracted from it. This allows Chaudhary to work with Benjamin’s critique of Bergson, for whom memory remains more exclusive of history. Chaudhary persuasively contends that his approach in reading 19th-century photography from the Indian subcontinent aims to examine how embodiment interfaces with history, not in an effort to plot direct correspondences between both but to explore what possibilities arise for visual discourse in relation to both.

For Chaudhary photography’s “reality effect” extends from its ontological properties, and he turns to Andre Bazin’s postures in explaining this. But he extends this discussion, which takes up the “indexical likeness” in relation to a reality effect by terming it photography’s rhetoric. Chaudhary’s use of rhetoric is not in a literal linguistic sense; instead, he derives from Cicero’s designation: “to please, to move, to teach” and this allows him to unpack the unstable nature of photographic rhetoric (p. 42). This is a very useful move and aligns Chaudhary’s interventions with recent scholarship in the fields of trauma and catastrophe studie as well as the post-digital revisitation of C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories, including indexicality as taken up by such figures as Laura Mulvey (2009). The reader is positioned to appreciate the instability in photographic meanings and discourse that in turn facilitates understanding the competing and conflictual uses of the medium. However, while Chaudhary does not adhere to the rigid “realist aesthetics” prescribed by Bazin through the concept of the “reality effect,” it is limiting to situate the discussion of photographic rhetoric upon a primarily ontological schema. This becomes particularly telling in the first chapter of the text, in which Chaudhary examines how death is evoked in post-1857 revolt images by photographers such as the Tytlers and Beato. Can a political deciphering of the photographs Chaudhary examines be sustained without necessarily following an ontological line of thought? It seems plausible, given that references to death in the photographic images he examines are often staged and given that Chaudhary himself posits Peirce’s categories of the symbol, icon and index as not necessarily compartmentalized and oppositional. Ulrich Baer, as referenced by Chaudhary, has argued for how the stillness of the photographic image, the instant when it is clicked, can approximate and reflect states of trauma. This stands to be suppressed in an ontological line of the Bazinian sense. There the negotiating force-field between subject and photographer—the very field that Baer and Chaudhary are entering and positing as negotiated—is subsumed under the weight of the trace in the photographic image. In...