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

Zahid R. Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire is a theoretical consideration of the photographic image in the historical context of British colonialism in South Asia. His understanding of photography is rooted first in an acknowledgement of its formative role in, and as a sign of, modernity. This role is evident in photography’s technological reproduc-ibility and, more broadly, in photography’s creation of a “newly technologized body on a mass scale” (2).

This formulation alerts us to Chaudhary’s interest in the modernity of the medium, one that he anchors in a phenomenological account of the experience of photography. For the photographer, the camera is a mode of sensation, a prosthetic device incorporated into an embodied engagement with the world. For the viewer, the photograph is a way of making sense. Somewhere between photographer and viewer, between the camera as sensation and the image as making sense, lies photography’s persuasive power as well as its historical function. We may rationally critique or refute the image, but even that critique attests to the power of the photograph to engage our perceptual orientation and strike us at the level of affect.

Chaudhary thus joins familiar reflections on modernity (drawing from Walter Benjamin) with a phenomenological understanding of the medium (drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and embeds both of these strands of thinking in nineteenth-century India. In Chaudhary’s account, colonialism and its operations can be understood through a phenomenological account of photography. More pertinently, a phenomenological account of embodied perception, sensation, and sense-making, enabled by photography, ought to be tied to historically specific life-worlds.

But whence does photography’s persuasive function arise? The photograph as index—its status as a direct trace of what it shows—is at the heart of any consideration of its persuasive power. Chaudhary proposes that while this index may have evidentiary power (as, for example, with police photography), it is also fundamentally unstable and draws on other modes of suasion to solidify its claims. Take, for example, the tourist photography aimed at British consumers that commemorated key episodes in the history of British colonialism in India, including uprisings by Indians that posed major threats to colonialism. These images, taken after the most dramatic and violent encounters, were often of empty spaces, putative sites of native atrocities perpetrated against European women and children, or sites of fierce battles and heroism. As such, the images eschew the truth claims of photography and represent loss allegorically: all we see are empty spaces in which lives were lost, not the events that transpired in those spaces. In place of a rational and indiscriminating truth-claim, the image anchors more “archaic forms of signification” such as the allegory (43). The referent of the photograph is never pre-deter-mined and always open to re-signification depending on context, much as the meaning of allegory shifts contingent on context. This is how the allegorical image enters history; its meanings and referents are not contained in the image, but rather in the faith and retrospective historical knowledge we bring to bear on the image.

Chaudhary proposes that we see the ethnographic photography of nineteenth-century British India as more than a form of paranoid surveillance of natives doubling as racialized knowledge. Ethnographic photography, with its assertions about the moral and criminal character of so-called native types, depends less on veracity than on repeated circulation and reproduction, much the way rumor functions. Clashing rhetorical functions contaminate the photographic image, undermining its presumed aspiration to objectivity.

Chaudhary eschews an empirical history in favor of a theoretical reflection on and around notable images. He asserts that he does not attend to “an identifiable Indian counter-photography” because it did not exist; photography was affordable only to indigenous elites (29). Like all photography in its early decades in India, the images produced by these Indian elites were imbricated within “an imperialist representational terrain” (30). However, tantalizing glimpses...