Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India

Introduction: Sensation and Photography

1 introduction Sensation and Photography The body is our anchorage in a world. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception Just as the mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” Persuasion How might we reorient our understandings of colonial representations if we shift our focus to that interface between bodies and world that is the precondition for making meaning? In Afterimage of Empire I argue that, following the well-traveled routes of global capital, photography arrives in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that extends and transforms sight for photographers and the body politic, British and Indian alike. Such perceptual transformations are congruent not only with the technomaterial changes within photographic practice but also with transformations at the level of aesthetic form. These transformations show that while sensing the world is inseparable from, though not identical with, making sense of it, the traffic between sense perception and ideation is historically conditioned. The global dissemination of photography in the 1800s has had irreversible effects on the modern formation of the senses. A viewer’s relationship to a photograph at first involves sight, only in order to set sight itself within the play of other sensate experiences: smell, hearing, touch, taste, but also embodied experiences of memory, desire, pleasure, and pain. While such experiences cannot be dissociated from the sensory and affective experience of older mimetic forms, such as novels or poems, photography at this early juncture did introduction 2 not require textual or elite–aesthetic literacy as its condition of reception.1 So its reach qualitatively and quantitatively increased over the course of the nineteenth century. In the early era of photography, observers viewed this new medium’s aesthetic potential with enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure . This period is pivotal in assessing the formative contribution of photography to the history of sensate experience—of the aesthetic, in its root sense. I assume that a key aspect of early photography is not simply to represent or to produce images but to help form a newly technologized body on a mass scale across diverse social formations. If, following Marx, the “formation [Bildung] of the five senses is the work of all previous history,”2 then in this study I understand photography as establishing a new Bildung that is global in scope. The cultural, material, and economic contradictions and effects of capitalism take an especially acute form in the colonies, and photography’s negotiation with this terrain in India is particularly instructive, not only for a genealogy of colonial visual culture, but also for theories of photographic practice. What the colonial history of the medium may have to teach us about the making of the modern perceptual apparatus, of the links between perception and meaning, and of the transformation of aesthetic experience itself, is the primary focus of this book. An anecdote from colonial history serves to show the subtle dance between sensing and making sense, framing and persuasion. On October 15, 1869, while visiting London, Syed Ahmed Khan, an Indian Muslim reformer and essayist, wrote a long and detailed letter to the secretary of the Scientific Society at Allygurgh. The letter later appeared in Urdu and in English translation in the Allygurgh Institute Gazette. In the context of a discussion of the English treatment of Indians, he writes: In the India Office is a book in which the races of all India are depicted in pictures and in letterpress, giving the manners and customs of each race. Their photographs show that the pictures of the different manners and customs were taken on the spot, and the sight of them shows how savage they are—the equals of animals. The young Englishmen who, after passing the preliminary Civil Service examination, have to pass examinations on special subjects for two years afterwards, come to the India Office preparatory to starting for India, and, desirous of knowing something of the land to which they are going, also look over this work. What can they think, after perusing this book and looking at its pictures, of the power and honour of the natives of India? One day Hamid, Mahmud [Khan’s sons], and I went to the India Office, and Mahmud commenced looking at the work. A young Englishman, probably a passed civilian, came up...