Abstract
In his illuminating foreword, Christopher Pinney says:
‘Visual Histories of South Asia is one of the first comprehensive contributions to the rapidly developing cross-disciplinary scholarship that connects visual studies with South-Asian historiography.’ It covers a rich thematic agenda with contributions ranging from ethnographic research to gender studies, fine arts analyses, theoretical and methodological questions, economic structures, international politics and contemporary cultural patterns.
This volume is the result of two international conferences organised at the University of Cambridge on the theme of South Asian history and Visual Culture ‘Exploring Modern South Asian History with Visual Research Methods: Theories and Practices’ (2013) and ‘Visual Anthropology and Contemporary South Asian History’ (2014).
The volume contains 13 articles on diverse subjects. Some highlight the political and educational discourses, while others explore the role played by technological developments in shaping ‘New Cartographies of South Asian History’.
Marcus Banks takes the opportunity to look back over two decades of his own practice in his article titled ‘An Archaeology of Visual Practices: Exploring One’s Own Archive’ using his photographs of Indian subjects in India and the UK to show the suitability of photographic reading. Banks emphasises that the anthropological approaches to time and social change have been massively revised in the twentieth century and cites in this context the works of George Foster et al. and Miranda White.
The second article titled ‘All for One, One for All’ by Denis Vidal discusses issues of ethnocentrism and popular art and explores a form of ethnic art of Pardhan Gonds that came into light in the 1980s, thanks to initiative of poet-administrator, Ashok Vajpayee and well-known painter Jagadish Swaminathan supported by a few enlightened administrators and artists. The initiative resulted into emergence of Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh). Denis Vidal observes that Swaminathan was well known among the intelligentsia not only for his qualities as a renowned painter but also as ‘a cultural militant’. Bharat Bhawan soon became a vibrating centre of diverse cultural activities under one roof.
The third chapter titled ‘Decorum: Courtly Posturing in the Visual Economy of Indo-Danish Diplomacy’ envisages the portrayal of the historical and cultural dimensions of the early modern Indo-Danish diplomatic and mercantile exchanges on the basis of the cultural programme of the Durbar Hall at the Thanjavur Palace.
Imma Romos’ chapter on ‘The Visual Politics of Menstruation, Birth and Devotion at Kamakhya Temple in Assam’ concentrates on a detailed examination of Kamakhya’s socio-religious context during the Pala and Koch periods, with particular emphasis on visual expression of sexuality and gender. She has carefully examined the chronology and historicity of the Kamakhya Temple and the significance of the image of Lajja Gauri and has understood correctly the meaning of the anthropomorphic form of the goddess.
The chapter written by Thomas Simpson titled ‘A Fragmented Gaze: Depictions of Frontier Tribes and the Beginning of Colonial Anthropology’ deals with the technologies of visual representation, colonial depictions of Indian frontier peoples and ‘post-Rebellion’ colonial governance during mid to late nineteenth-century ethnographic images selected from the collection of Robert Woodthorpe and several other contributors to ‘The People of India’ (1868–75) and has been utilised in the chapter. Simpson is concerned with the colonial production of images as a means of control, but also argues that in many cases, the outputs are ambiguous ‘visual fragmentation’ as he terms it.
‘Perpetual Antiquity in Early Photographs of Ceylon’ by Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes presents another study of colonial visual identities. It is an example of cross-interdisciplinary research methodology in which the study of the visual history of Ceylon becomes the prerogative of visual theories as much as that of the historian.
Teresa Segura-Garcia’s ‘Picturing Indian Kingship: The Photographic Practices of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda’ deals with the studio portraits of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III, Gaekwar of Baroda, made in 1919 in London. These portraits were used as successful ‘instruments of colonial knowledge’ meant to depict the third mutable visual identity of Indian kingship during colonial era vindicating the fact that they neither completely belong to the category of traditional autocrats nor to the class of Anglicised princes, but their category was somehow born from the overlapping of these two contrasting categories, perhaps becoming the case for what Homi Bhabha calls as ‘Hybridity’.
Xavier Guegan’s ‘From Princely to Barbaric: Indian Masculinities as Colonial Landscape in Bourne and Bourne & Shepherd’s Photograph’ is based on the photographic artworks of Samuel Bourne aimed at rectifying the contemporary interpretations of the role played by British-Indian photographic practices in shaping Victorian representations of India.
Adrian Peter Ruprecht in ‘Teaching the Alphabet of Health to the Indian Masses: The Visual Languages of the Red Cross in India, 1918-39’ deals with the issues of visual literacy and governance in early- to mid-twentieth-century South Asia.
Aaron Bryant’s Democracy Beyond the Borders: Martin Luther King Jr and his Tour of India, 1959 studies the political spheres of influence between South Asia and the USA with the central emphasis on the iconic figure of Mahatma Gandhi and the ways in which he was admired by Martin Luther King Jr and how Gandhi’s concept of Ahimsa affected the strategy and policymaking process of Luther.
Souvik Naha’s ‘Visually Playing Politics: Use of Sports as Political Critique in Newspaper Cartoons’ deals with political cartoons of sporting events that took place in India between the 1960s and the 1980s.
‘Framing Simla: The Queen of Hill Stations and the Politics of Iconography’ by Siddharth Pandey deals with how the practices of colonial and cultural representations influenced the production of several paintings, lithographs, photographs and postcards representing Shimla.
Ronnie Parciack in his ‘New Medium, New Historiography: Re-Narrating Islamic Pasts in India through VCDs’ emphasises that the perception of history as reflected in ancient texts and traditions such as Vedas and Puranas elaborating ‘Itihasa’ as ‘what indeed happened’, depicting the chronicles of the world, the enigma of cosmogony, the theory of moral, ethical, social and world order do not conform to the conventions of modern historiography. This claim which has been made by Parciack in this article is not absolutely free from certain baseless biases.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, this book marks for the beginning of new era in the field of South Asian history, especially Indian historiography and cultural anthropology. The quality of this book which makes it stand apart from others is its use of visual and photographic evidence as source of ethnic and cultural history and its cross-, trans- and interdisciplinary approach. However, as any intellectual enterprise apart from its outstanding qualities has some serious flaws, this book too has some of those flaws. This book, in almost all its articles except few, carries the gaze of the colonial master, trying to look at the natives and their respective histories from the ‘others’ perspective keeping their all-exclusive approach intact. Being all exclusive, and slightly inclusive in its approach, this book offers a very mild critique of colonialism further deepening the rift between the ‘master’ and the ‘slave’. There is not a single instance where Indian freedom struggle is referred and valorised except in the 10th chapter where Mahatma Gandhi is referred in reference to Martin Luther King Jr and in the eighth chapter where Indian Mutiny of 1857 is presented in a cold shredded manner reducing it to a mere singular unimportant incident in the modern Indian history.
This book offers a very loose account of modern India and its struggle for freedom from colonial power with respect to the rise of British imperialism and industrialisation brought in India by Britishers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Concludingly, despite of its some shortcomings, this book marks a new beginning and trend in the area of Indian historiography with a special focus on South Asian visual history.