Photographing Imperial Citizenship: The Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee’s Lanternslide Lectures,1900–1945

Seeing Geography, Picturing Empire: The First COVIC Lectures on England

The COVIC lecture scheme was an ambitious project that attempted to visually consolidate the largest empire the world had yet seen, which at the time encompassed 12 million square miles of land and one-quarter of the world’s population (Ó Tuathail, 1992: 104). As the preface to each textbook asserted (Figure 2), ‘The component parts of the British Empire are so remote and so different from one another, that it is evident the Empire can only be held together by sympathy and understanding … imparted to the coming generation … [and] taught in the Schools of the Empire’ (Mackinder, 1910: v). To encourage these feelings of sympathy and unity in viewers, imperial citizenship was most often depicted as a collective effort to defend the empire, resulting in recurring group portraits of figures such as shipbuilders (Figure 3), military regiments (Figure 4), and ‘native policemen’ (Figure 5). Images of ‘native’ army and police forces are a leitmotif woven throughout the COVIC project, appearing in almost every lecture, with the exception of England and those on the white, ‘settler colonies’ of Canada and Australia. And, much like the photograph of the deck of the steam ship that begins every COVIC lecture, these groups are captured at a distance from the viewer, often with their backs turned towards the camera. There is a sense in many of the COVIC photographs that human subjects are interchangeable rather than unique: that their designation as imperial citizens is measured by the physical and affective labour they offer in the defence of the empire, and that this labour takes on added value if it seems to run counter to the subject’s ‘natural’ affiliations based on race, religion, or class. As representations of local populations that were not only successfully ‘civilized’ but were now willingly participating in the reproduction of colonial rule, these groups attested to the successes of British imperialism in ‘(re)produc[ing] citizens who are capable of governing themselves, of acting in their own interests and in solidarity with others’ (Cruikshank, 1999: 3). As Barbara Cruikshank has provocatively argued, by emphasizing the importance of agency and self-governance in defining citizenship, projects like COVIC demonstrate that, ‘citizens are not born; they are made’ (1999: 3).

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Figure 2:

Cover to Eight Lectures on India, (London: Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee/Waterlow & Sons), 1910 (c) British Library Board General Reference Collection 010055.de.58.Asia, Pacific & Africa IOL.1947.a.

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Figure 3:

A. Hugh Fisher, Men leaving Portsmouth Dockyard for Saturday half-holiday, England, 1909, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album XXI, no. 5043. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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Figure 4:

A. Hugh Fisher, The 18th Prince of Wales’s Tiwana Horse Lancers, Delhi, India, 1908, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album V, no. 727. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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Figure 5:

A. Hugh Fisher, Tanjore - ordinary Native policemen being drilled on the Maidan, India, 1908, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album II, no. 231. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

This focus on making imperial citizens perhaps explains the COVIC lectures’ curious status as a set of geography lessons that contain almost no maps. From the outset, it was photography, not cartography, that the committee proposed would achieve COVIC’s pedagogical goals. Michael E. Sadler, a civil servant who first proposed the lanternslide lecture scheme to the British government’s Board of Education in 1902, stressed the importance of sight in encouraging feelings of imperial sympathy in students: ‘The object in view is to give every citizen of the Empire an opportunity of seeing what the different parts of the Empire are like’, he wrote in his seven-page memorandum. ‘Much can be learnt by the eye as well as through the ear’ (1902, emphasis added). From 1905 until its official dissolution in 1924, the COVIC committee worked to meet Sadler’s goals, producing sets that included photographic slides (numbering between 350 and 400 images), 25 textbooks and one magic lantern and sold to government houses and boards of education around the world. COVIC intended for colonial schoolchildren to receive sets of slides about the ‘Mother Country’, while English schoolchildren would see slides about the colonies. ⁶ This method of organization established a double audience, each with their own set of expectations and lived experiences of the empire (see Colonial Office, Misc. no. 174, 1905).

The instructive potential of photography was particularly important to Halford J. Mackinder, a geographer and former director of the London School of Economics, who was appointed Chair of the committee in its early years and authored many of its textbooks. It was under his guidance that the lectures came to treat the study of geography as an imaginative and visual endeavour, encouraging students to project themselves into the spaces projected onto the screen (Ryan 1994: 169). ⁷ His widely publicized views on the importance of geography as ‘a special form of visualisation’ solidified COVIC’s reliance on sight as the sense through which the empire should be understood (Mackinder, 1911: 80). Nowhere is the implied photographic vision of the COVIC project clearer than in the committee’s plans for the production of images for the lectures. Unlike its contemporaries in the field of state-sponsored visual instruction (such as the American Natural History Museum’s ambitious lanternslide lending collection, an important model for the COVIC series), the COVIC slide sets were not assembled from existing collections of images, but were produced specifically for the project by a single photographer. Alfred Hugh Fisher, a newspaper illustrator and fine art engraver who had no experience with photography, was hired by the committee in 1907 and embarked on a three-year voyage around the world, producing more than 7600 images to be used in the COVIC lectures (Misc. No. 160, 1907). The committee’s plans for Fisher’s travel revealed the members’ faith in the organization and interconnectedness of the empire, not just as a form of rhetoric but as a practical reality. COVIC arranged for the photographer to travel free of charge aboard the ships of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and on the trains of several national railway corporations, plans made despite the fact that they guaranteed that Fisher would never see Africa or the West Indies – areas he was asked to document by collecting what he thought to be representative views of those colonies from commercial photographers during his travels. ⁸ Mackinder provided Fisher with a list of the types of views he would need for the lectures, asking him to include ‘as much suggestion of movement as possible’ in his photographs through depictions of ‘groups actively employed in some characteristic way’ (Mackinder, 1906, 1907). From the beginning, Mackinder insisted that, for the lectures to be effective, the texts should be written to the images that would be shown to students. This meant that Fisher’s photographs would not simply function as illustrations to existing lessons on the geography of the empire: they would literally structure the content of the lectures, serving as important visual lessons of their own.

As a non-legal, rhetorical category of belonging, imperial citizenship had until now been invisible: promised through colonial proclamations, political petitions, and government policies, but rarely visualized. By insisting that imperial citizenship needed to be learned in the schools of the empire, and using photographs to do this teaching, COVIC visualized imperial citizenship, borrowing from existing ideas about imperial belonging circulating in policy and print culture and attempting to concretize them through visual representations. This visualization was inconsistent, however, flickering in and out of focus among the familiar and highly visual categories of difference that had long sustained representations of empire. In the COVIC lectures, the problems government officials and colonial critics had both encountered in defining imperial citizenship became problems of the limits of visual representation. Because imperial citizenship was an inherently abstract, and therefore blurry political category – mobilized equally by supporters and dissidents of empire – photography was incapable of rendering it in clear and comprehensive terms. ⁹ When photographic evidence fails in the COVIC lectures, it is supplemented with textual and verbal appeals to the imaginary, with demands for forms of projection and identification on the part of the spectator. The photographs of ‘native’ military forces in India, such as those in Tanjore (Figure 5), required the careful supplementation of the lecture texts if they were to be understood as representations of imperial citizenship. Although the COVIC lectures on India were published more than 50 years after the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, the lanternslide images and texts were haunted by representations of the local population’s insurrection, especially as images of the Mutiny continued to circulate in newspaper accounts and government documents worried about the possibility of a ‘Second Mutiny’ in British India at the beginning of the 20th century (a point to which I will return). To ensure the COVIC images of groups of Indian officers were interpreted as representations of willing imperial citizens, readily defending the empire, the lecture texts went to great lengths to assure viewers that these were just ‘drills’ or ‘practices’ by subjects who ‘remained loyal during the Mutiny’ (Mackinder, 1910: 119).

The COVIC lectures’ treatment of images of ‘native’ military therefore demonstrate the distinction Shawn Michelle Smith makes between photographic evidence – what can be seen in the image – and photographic meaning – the interpretation that viewers make from this image. For Smith, photographic meaning is contingent, malleable and notoriously unreliable: ‘Photographs as evidence are never enough, for photographic meaning is always shaped by context and circulation, and determined by viewers. Photographic meaning results from what we do with photographic evidence’ (2007: 41). In the COVIC lectures, photography was insufficient in securing the parameters of imperial citizenship and had to be supplemented through texts that instructed viewers on how to access this meaning through their practices of looking. These moments of uncertainty about how to represent imperial citizenship also cast doubt onto whether the existing, supposedly stable categories of difference that structured colonial power – especially race – were ever about vision or visibility at all (Campt, 2012).

While other scholars (MacKenzie, 1984; Ryan, 1997) have read the COVIC lectures’ rhetoric of imperial unity against the photographs’ disparate representations, and looked for visual mistakes or insufficiencies in the project’s dominant narrative, I am interested in paying attention to the ways the COVIC project acknowledged, rather than obscured, these discrepancies. For the committee, the tension between seeing racial difference but recognizing imperial citizenship was inherent to the model of belonging espoused by the project. The premise of COVIC was that students could be taught to feel through these contradictions using photography’s pedagogical potential.

The publication of the first set of COVIC lectures is a testament to Christopher Pinney’s assertion that the colonies were often the ‘testing grounds for new techniques of visual control’ (1997: 17). Published for the first time in 1907 as Seven Lectures on the United Kingdom, they took England as their subject matter, but were addressed to Indian students. Still considered the ‘jewel in the crown of the British Empire’ in this period, it is perhaps unsurprising that India figured as the ideal audience for the COVIC lectures. What is unusual is the committee’s decision to adapt these lectures for use in British classrooms in 1909, a choice that raises interesting questions in thinking about the relationship between photography, citizenship, and spectatorship. Rather than adapting the language or imagery from the scripts meant for Indian students, Mackinder left the texts on England relatively unchanged for this later edition, adding a preface explaining: ‘The effort on the part of English children to imagine themselves in the position of Indian children should tend to arouse and impress a valuable feeling of political sympathy’ (Mackinder, 1909: vi). From its earliest publications, the pedagogical aims of the COVIC lecture scheme moved beyond simple knowledge transmission. Implicit in Mackinder’s explanation is a belief that photography permitted a special kind of spectatorial projection and sympathy, allowing viewers to not only learn about the wider world, but to imagine what it might be like to occupy another subject position, and to look back at representations of themselves from this outside perspective. Projection therefore happened in several directions in the COVIC lectures: photographs of distant imperial citizens were projected onto the walls and screens of the classroom, bringing the empire’s far-flung corners into a virtual proximity with one another, while viewers were also asked to imaginatively project themselves into the spaces depicted by the images and into the position of other spectators of the lectures who might be located halfway around the world. The publication of a set of eight lectures on India, meant to be seen by English schoolchildren, the following year (1910), underscores the reciprocal model of spectatorship that the COVIC project espoused.

This spectatorial projection was facilitated by the theatrical presentation made possible by the magic lantern, which transformed still photographs into life-sized images animated by the teacher’s recitation of the lectures. As geography historian James R. Ryan notes, the committee’s decision to use lanternslides – 3¼ inch square glass slides – was designed to enliven the study of geography, drawing on the technology’s reputation as a ‘form of indoor, imaginative fieldwork, often emulating manly imperial adventure’ (1994: 169). Ryan’s description of lanternslide lectures – as imaginative, as fieldwork, and as manly – conveys the varied uses to which the magic lantern was put in the Edwardian period. Though their popularity as middle-class entertainment peaked in the middle of the 19th century, lanternslide presentations continued to be used in classrooms, churches, and village halls well into the 20th century to show everything from morality plays and sermons, to soap operas, anthropological field studies, and amateur travelogues. ¹⁰ By choosing to employ the same technology, the COVIC series borrowed lessons about racial inferiority and imperial improvement from concurrent religious, anthropological, and propagandistic presentations, drawing from the visual databank they would have constructed in the minds of viewers to construct similar hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Missionary lanternslide lectures, which relied upon ‘before and after’ photographic portraits of colonial subjects to demonstrate the ‘benefits’ of religious and imperial intervention in indigenous life, ethnographic and anthropometric photographs used to teach anthropology to professionals and to students in English universities, and heroic accounts of male explorers sent out on government-sponsored expeditions to the only uncharted spaces left on the Edwardian globe (such as Robert Peary’s trip to the North Pole in 1909, or Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal expedition to the Antarctic in 1910), all employed photographs to convey narratives of colonial progress. The tone of COVIC’s lanternslide presentations was considerably subtler than that of its peers, but by using the same visual technology, and theatrical mode of presentation, the project implicitly asked viewers to read these images of empire as another set of lessons about the benefits of imperialism. While the subjects of these lectures are wide-ranging, sometimes contradicting one another’s messages about the empire, what unified Edwardian lanternslide lectures was their didacticism, which combined image and spoken text to convey a public lesson.

Despite the ambitious language the committee employed to describe the aims of the COVIC project, the images Fisher produced for the slide lectures are, aesthetically, quite boring. Taken during a period of relative political calm, the COVIC project had no devastating wars to capture, nor any symbolic victories to record, forcing Fisher to represent banal scenes as cause for a feeling of imperialist pride. Group portraits and street scenes are the norm, emphasizing everyday life in the empire. Much of the subject matter of the COVIC photographs was predetermined by Mackinder, who worked not only as editor of the series’ textbooks, but also operated as a director of photography would on a film shoot. In a lengthy letter to Fisher, Mackinder gave the photographer explicit instructions about the type of ‘views’ to create, including a slide list that imagined the kinds of subjects he would need as an author (Mackinder, 1907). And, though Fisher was equipped with a Sanger-Shepard model camera – a piece of cutting-edge technology when he began taking photographs for COVIC in 1907 ¹¹ – he was, until his contract began with COVIC, untrained in photography, and many of his images seem to be made with a view to what would translate into a successful engraving or print (his usual occupation), rather than a photograph or lanternslide. Fisher mailed batches of his negatives and prints, often developed in the bathroom sinks of his hotel rooms, as well as his journal notes, back to England each month, where Mackinder selected the images to be used in the lectures and wrote the texts to accompany them (Fisher, 1907).

If there is an ideological force to the lectures, then it comes from Mackinder’s writing in the textbooks, which adopted a warm, humanist tone, addressing his school-aged audience as ‘we’, asking viewers to imaginatively place themselves in the spaces of the photographs, and insisting that, as imperial citizens, they would be welcome in any part of the empire. Early on in the lectures on England that were presented to students in India, for instance, he provides the addresses of the Northbrook Society and the National Indian Association, who he says will welcome and introduce ‘Indian students and others who happen to have no friends in London’ (Mackinder, 1909: 8). As the lectures continue on to photographs of the country’s great universities, Mackinder establishes class distinctions between the city and country, describing the students of Eton and Oxford, pictured at play on soccer pitches, as ‘the men whom we know here in India as officers of the Army and of the Navy, as Civil Servants, and as merchants’, whereas England’s small towns and countryside are said to be ‘the early surroundings of those whom we know chiefly as the rank and file of the Army and as the sailors of the Navy’ (Mackinder, 1909: 59).

Here, schooling is seen as an access point to international mobility, where English students secure their ability to travel to the colonies through their education as colonial bureaucrats at universities for the middle class or their training in the navy and army for the lower classes. In one of Fisher’s photographs (Figure 6), a group of sailors on board the King Edward, one of the largest warships ever built in the United Kingdom, stand in for the sailors of Mackinder’s text. The image is structured by the ‘rank and file’ that the lectures describe, with row upon row of stern-faced young men in uniform stretching back into the horizon line of the image. None of the men return the gaze of the camera, looking instead to the figures at the right and left of the frame that hand out their pay as they disembark. The militaristic tone of these photographs is obvious, shoring up the texts’ patriotic assurances that the empire is held together by the cooperation of its citizens, working together to defend its borders. But if this image is also meant to tell us something about what it means to feel like an imperial citizen, it is perhaps that a kind of emotional restraint is what is expected from the modern colonial citizen that wishes to travel within the empire, as Lily Cho (2013) has suggested. These are also photographs that fall into a category that Tina Campt describes as ‘images of institutional membership whose consumption was intended to construct an affiliative relation between the viewer and the viewed’ (2012: 58). The model of affiliation and connection that COVIC offers is not the warm and fuzzy kind located in the domestic space of the home, however. Instead it is a calm, detached, and public form of belonging guaranteed through institutional membership. To join this community of imperial citizens and to access the mobility it offers is, the photograph suggests, to identify with the stern comportment of this group of serious men over the affective structures of the family unit. ¹²

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Figure 6:

A. Hugh Fisher, Paying the men in the Battery: King Edward VII, Portsmouth, England, 1909, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album XXI, no. 5014. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Mackinder’s appeal to the Indian viewer to conflate these images of unindividuated white men with the real-life representatives of empire that she would encounter outside of the classroom underscores the performative function that Fisher’s photographs were meant to play in the classroom. To interpret these subjects as imperial citizens means to recognize them, through their rank and class positions, as already-familiar: to sympathize with them, not as strangers, but as future acquaintances who will inevitably cross the viewer’s path through the circulatory systems of the ‘living entity’ of the empire. Accompanied by Mackinder’s use of biological vocabulary, describing England as ‘the heart and the brain of the Empire’ (1909: 31) which must be nourished by the colonies, this appeal to the viewer’s sympathies serves to naturalize the power relations at play in the colonial context.

Though there are few accounts from students and teachers about how they used and understood the COVIC photographs, there is evidence that viewers were aware of the double standards of imperial citizenship even from the earliest presentations of the lectures. While Mackinder’s texts promised students that they could travel anywhere in the empire and find themselves at home, under the same flag and king and among fellow citizens, reports from the teachers who presented test versions of the lectures on England in 1905 point out that, for the majority of the empire’s citizens, travel itself was impossible. One headmaster in the Gold Coast of Africa (now Ghana) noted that the lectures were well-received, but that the texts had to be significantly adapted in some cases to be able to explain to students who lived inland how sea travel and transportation worked, since they had never seen the ocean (Government House of the Gold Coast, 1907). Another teacher at a girls’ school in Hong Kong had ‘nothing but praise’ for the lectures’ effectiveness, especially for her female students who, she noted, ‘have few, if any, facilities for [physically] traveling’ through the empire (High Commissioner of Hong Kong, 1907). By reminding the committee that the material conditions of colonial life made the international travel depicted in the COVIC lectures a photographic fantasy, these reports convey an implicit awareness that many of the rights guaranteed by imperial citizenship were empty promises. In the next set of lectures on India, presented to British students in 1910, the unevenness with which the rights of citizenship were applied across the empire becomes even more apparent: an inconsistency that would take on added political urgency in the face of Indian demands for independence and sovereignty as the lectures continued to circulate in classrooms as late as 1945.

Snake Charmers and Other Potentially Mutinous Subjects: Fears of a ‘Second Mutiny’ in India

The COVIC lectures on India were, along with those on England, the most popular in the series, circulating to thousands of schools around the empire, and they saw Fisher experiment with a greater diversity of subject matter and a wider array of formal choices in his photographs. Gone are the stiff views of well-formed groups that typified the photographs of England; in their place, the India lectures offer the viewer a close encounter with subjects in frontal scenes that place the camera in the middle of events with a kind of immediacy that borders on reportage. This change in the aesthetic of the images of India seem equally the result of Fisher’s increasing competence with the camera (they were made over the course of several years, and after his tour of England), as well as the fantastical pull of representations of India in the colonial imaginary. Like many Edwardians, Fisher would have had a robust visual archive of colonial representations of ‘exotic’ India in his mind, available to mimic in his own photographs. In a series of photographs of a fair in Rosa, for instance (Figure 7), Fisher positions the camera as another spectator of the leisure activities already taking place, with one figure in the foreground – a small boy on the left-hand side, with a small package tucked under one arm – so close to the camera that he is out of focus. Though most of the subjects return our gaze, including the passengers on the Ferris wheel who turn around to look at the camera, they do not look posed so much as briefly paused in the middle of their activities to acknowledge the camera’s presence. Unlike the tours of the shipyards and factories that appeared in the lectures on England, which seemed designed to be seen by .’s camera alone, the photographs of India mimic the snapshot aesthetic of vernacular photography: they seem to capture everyday life as it unfolds. ¹³

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Figure 7:

A. Hugh Fisher, Rosa. Fair of the Saint, India, 1908, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album VII, no. 1004. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Not only are Fisher’s photographs of India more visually interesting, but Mackinder’s texts also take on a more evocative tone in the Indian lectures, perhaps because he was drawing on his interpretations of Fisher’s photographs, and his imagination, as much as he was his geographical knowledge. As one of his biographers points out, Mackinder was fascinated with India in part because he had never travelled there (Kearns, 2009: 177); when he lists India’s ‘common sights’ or ‘typical scenes’, he is imagining them through Fisher’s photographs, just as his children viewers were asked to. As the imagined ship arrives in Tuticorin, for instance, Mackinder’s text adopts the familiar tone of colonial travel writing to describe the scene:

We land. Dark gesticulating figures surround us, scantily clad in white cotton. The morning sun casts long shadows, but there is a throng of people, for the work of India is done in the cool of the morning. The express train to Madras is waiting, but we have a short time for that first stroll, which leaves so deep an impression on the traveller setting foot in a new land. (1910: 5)

While Mackinder’s text works to Other these Indian subjects, in language that is a far cry from the familiar tone used to describe the English sailors, the layout of the textbooks contributed another, often contradictory, level of narration to the images by including reproductions of some of the slides, printed in pairs placed sporadically throughout the books. These pairings seem to have been chosen by the book publisher for their visual interest and formal connections rather than their original order in the lectures, often creating compare-and-contrast relationships between images that are not reflected in the lecture texts (Figure 8).

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Figure 8:

Illustrations from Eight Lectures on India, 2nd edition (London: Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee and George Philip and Son, 1910) © British Library Board General Reference Collection 010055.de.58.Asia, Pacific & Africa IOL.1947.a.1706 p 54–55

Like the other lectures in the series, the images that Mackinder selected for the India slides prioritize group portraits and street scenes over photographs of individuals. This emphasis on the collective over the individual portrait was in keeping with the England lectures’ emphasis on group scenes, but was also emblematic of a turn in the broader visual culture of India in this period. As Pinney (1997) notes, colonial photography projects in India shifted away from anthropometric photography – which used the features of a single subject to try to build taxonomies of racial or ethnic differences – and towards group portraiture as a kind of aesthetic hangover after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A sense of having failed to predict or prevent the mutiny, of not having ‘seen it coming’, pervaded public discourse in the years after the conflict and cast doubt on the legibility of the human body captured by photographs. Individual portraits may have told anthropologists something about what each ‘race’ looked like, but it did nothing to predict the political allegiances of each religious and caste group in the lead-up to the mutiny. Since photographs of individual bodies were insufficient in representing generalized social identities, post-mutiny photography projects focused instead on the ‘external traces of a collectivity’ (Pinney, 1997: 70). This explains the formal tropes of projects like The People of India (1868–75), an antecedent to the COVIC project that attempted to catalogue ethnic and caste groups by bringing together 468 existing photographs from various private and public collections into a multivolume publication.

The mutiny forced colonial photography projects like COVIC to overthrow the ‘typical’ formal conventions of anthropological photography for the exigencies of the political moment. As historian Kim A. Wagner suggests, a scepticism about the visual legibility of the individual body was part of a wider ‘enduring legacy of fear’ that animated much colonial discourse and policy in India after 1857, leading to a series of non-events that Wagner describes as ‘colonial information panics’ (2013: 160). ¹⁴ Wagner traces several moments in post-1857 British India where newspapers and colonial paperwork struggled to make sense of trends or changes in the local population, always with the fear that seemingly everyday practices – such as the exchange of chapattis or the dabbing of mud onto trees – might portend a ‘Second Mutiny’. In these expressions of anxiety about what these visual signs might mean, ‘The colonial culture of fear found its expression at the convergence of the colonial imagination and colonial information, effectively blurring the lines between public opinion and government policy’ (Wagner, 2013: 162). Fisher’s photographs can be interpreted as another source of this unsettled information: visual clues about Indian subjects whose meanings had yet to be deciphered. In other words, the committee’s fantasies about building a sense of pan-imperial collectivity, by borrowing the notion of imperial citizenship, here butts up against the fears of what collectives of colonial subjects could do, lending the lectures on India an undertone of anxiety and colonial paranoia.

In COVIC’s section about Benares (now Varanasi), one of India’s oldest cities and a centre of spiritual education, a range of ‘typical scenes’ is presented to the viewer, including snake-handlers, bazaars, and carnivals (Figures 9 and 10). I want to dwell on two of these images, of a ‘fakir’ lying on a bed of nails, and of snake charmers, which appear one after the other in the slide list for the India lectures and side-by-side in the illustrations included in the textbooks given to students (Figure 8). They are familiar stereotypes in the era’s visual culture, so familiar that Mackinder seems to have felt it unnecessary to describe the figures at any length. The COVIC textbooks describe them in five economical sentences that are worth reproducing in full:

In the narrow deep-shaded streets, and the sordid and tawdry purlieus of the temples may be seen many a typical scene of Eastern life. Here, for instance, close to Aurangzeb’s Mosque, is a Fakir or religious enthusiast, to whom the alms of the faithful are due. He rests on this bed of spikes day and night. Such Fakirs get much alms, which they are supposed by the envious to bury underground. We have another characteristic scene here, two snake charmers on one of the ghats, with a fine assortment of reptiles – cobra, python, and other snakes, as well as scorpions. There is always a ready crowd for them, as for jugglers of curious skill. (Mackinder, 1910: 57)

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Figure 9:

A. Hugh Fisher, A Fakir, Benares, India, 1908, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album IV, no. 597. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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Figure 10:

A. Hugh Fisher, Snake charmers on the Desasumay Ghat at Benares—a cobra, python, and other snakes, India, 1908, quarter plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album IV, no. 585. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Returning the gaze of the camera, the subjects of Fisher’s photographs seem at ease with his presence, welcoming the viewer as the spectator of these scenes. At first, the figures in the backgrounds of both images seem to support what the lecture texts tell viewers to see. The expressions of the men behind the fakir (Figure 9) in particular convey an emotional neutrality and casualness that suggests the banality of the fakir’s performance. Standing in an open doorway, they gaze towards us rather than at the fakir, squinting into the bright sun overhead. Neither smiling in response to the camera – which at this historical moment was not yet a social convention – nor exhibiting overt aggression, they almost glare in Fisher’s direction. If their expression is somewhat neutral, the fakir himself is downright blasé, his face turned towards the camera in an expression of disinterest, his arms resting nonchalantly in his lap. Depicting the ‘native’ population’s suspicious or fearful reactions to the camera and the request – or injunction – to have their photograph taken was a trope in many colonial photography projects in the late 19th century, allowing colonialists to discount as irrational the indigenous population’s legitimate resistance to colonial violence, and to work through their own fetishistic relationship to photography by displacing it onto a racialized other (Ryan, 1997: 143). Neither Fisher’s photograph nor Mackinder’s text traffics in this trope, but the subjects’ inactivity, as well as their ambivalent annoyance with the camera’s presence, complicates COVIC’s narrative of imperial citizenship. The audience of the COVIC lectures might hear that they are welcome travellers in any part of the empire, but they can see there is no guarantee they will be greeted warmly upon arrival. Much like Fisher’s photograph of the sailors in England, neutrality and, in this case, indifference are the emotional tenors of imperial citizenship.

The photograph that follows this one (Figure 10) shows two men squatting in the foreground, handling several different species of snake and presenting them to the camera, but the image has been carefully framed to also include examples of ‘native’ architecture and several other human subjects, many carrying baskets and parcels, as they recede into the background, up the steps toward a line of trees. Two men stand on the steps just above the snake-handlers, one glancing at the ground as though distracted by something just outside the frame, while the other, a cloth held to his nose and mouth, is the only person in the image who looks at the snake handlers. Between these two standing male figures, a younger woman, dressed in a sari, wearing bangles and carrying a small bag, turns mid-stride to look back at the camera. The woman is striking, not just because she is the exception as the only non-male figure in the image, but because she seems to have been captured so candidly, as though she was going about her daily routine when Fisher, or someone else in the scene, hailed her, prompting her to turn back and look at the camera. Even more than her pose, it is her expression of bemusement that makes her exceptional: unlike the fakir in the preceding image, or the men in front of her, she exhibits a clear emotional response to the appearance of Fisher and the camera in the landscape. Not one of surprise, but of casual and amused recognition.

I have taken liberties in reading the responses of the onlookers in these two images (we will never know how these people felt, or even what they were looking at, in this encounter with Fisher) not because I hope to somehow rescue the emotional lives and biographies of these unknown colonial subjects, but because the network of gazes in these images is significant given the project’s pedagogical goals. If the COVIC lectures were based on the assumption that children could be taught to see imperial citizenship, then depictions of colonial subjects looking, at one another, and back at the viewer, would offer lessons of their own: lessons about how one should ‘look’ in the sense of appearance – the modes of dress and emotional comportment that can be appropriately expressed by a citizen of empire – and lessons about how one returns the look of another imperial citizen. ¹⁵

The lack of descriptive attention that Mackinder pays to these two photographs is at odds with their visual prominence in the COVIC textbooks on India. ¹⁶ While he goes on at length about other, much more banal, images of factories and waterways, he passes over these two group portraits in Benares quite quickly. Perhaps it was because the meaning of these charged figures was so obvious – a part of the colonial common sense about India at the time – that it did not need to be explicitly articulated. ¹⁷ As Wagner (2013) explains, one of the ‘lessons’ the British took from the rebellion was that the colonial authorities could not be seen to be interfering in local religious practices and beliefs, leading to an official policy of non-interference after 1857. Representations of religious leaders, and of fakirs, yogis, and snake charmers in particular, were charged with insurgent connotations in the Edwardian period, figures suspected of ‘spread[ing] sedition under the guise of devout asceticism’ (Wagner, 2013: 187). An image of a fakir leading a ‘Second Mutiny’ even appears in a 28 November 1908 edition of London’s weekly Penny Illustrated Paper (Figure 11). Published the same year Fisher was traveling through India, the newspaper depicts a messianic figure of the revolution, sweeping a burning torch with one hand to magically create the word ‘mutiny’ out of its smoke, while the other holds a coiled snake. Below him, a group of marching male students seemingly awaits his instructions, while on the right, eerily echoing Fisher’s compositional choices, several Indian women descend a staircase towards a river. By condensing these signs – the fakir, the snake charmer, and the Indian insurgent – into one figure, the drawing in the Penny Illustrated Paper demonstrates the currency of these representations in British public discourse in this period, the ways that these quasi-religious figures could operate as shorthand for both a reminder of past colonial insurgencies and a portent of those yet to come. ¹⁸

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Figure 11:

“The Shadow of a Mutiny: Unrest in India,” illustrated by E.P. Kinsella, Penny Illustrated Paper, 28 Nov. 1908. Captions in the image note, “Students parading the streets of Calcutta, singing their new patriotic hymn. Women waiting at Kowratullah, hoping that the ashes of Satyendra would be brought there after the cremation.” Courtesy of the British Library’s Newspaper Collection, © The British Library Board, General Reference Collection 1908-1909 Jan. 1908 - June 1909 Microform. MFM.M40517 [1908-1909]

That the symbolically loaded types of the fakir and the snake charmer appear in the section on Benares in the COVIC lectures is also significant for the specific local meanings of that site for British colonialists. While Lucknow is usually referenced as the main site of British casualties in the mutiny, Benares was also an important location of British-Indian violence because it was home to one of the country’s largest mints: a place targeted by the rebellion as a symbol of colonial rule, and also sought as a refuge by the British civilians living there. Accounts of the mutiny in Benares make much of the fighting that took place at the mint, on the steps of the river, and of the subsequent public hangings of rebels carried out by British troops and the burning of their bodies along the banks as a deterrent to any further rebellious acts (see Dodd, 1859; Thomas, 1858). The lecture texts do not mark the significance of Benares in the mutiny, except tacitly. In the India lectures, the images of the fakir and snake charmers are preceded by a lengthy discussion of Hindu burial practices, which the texts tell us involve burning the body of the deceased on pyres by the riverbank, along the ghats of the Ganges. For those students who were ‘seeing the world-drama as they read their morning paper’, as Mackinder hoped the lectures would help them do, contemporary newspaper speculations about the potential for a ‘Second Mutiny’, and reminders of the burning of insurgent bodies on ghats in Benares, may have come to mind as they viewed Fisher’s photographs.

If this connection is implicit in the COVIC lectures, the textbooks make it explicit. Printed on the verso of the side-by-side reproductions of the fakir and the snake charmers in Benares is another suggestive pairing: an image of a woman’s body burning on a pyre at a ghat in Benares and a photograph of a ‘Mutiny veteran’ standing in front of the Baillie Gate in Lucknow, a site that had become a public monument to the British killed in the fighting of 1857 (Figure 12). As Mackinder writes in the lecture texts about this image:

Here is the Baillie Gate itself, the scene of the most furious attacks on the British position. The old man whom we note with his hat off and a medal on his breast is the guardian of the place, a veteran of the Mutiny, who as a boy took part in the defence of Lucknow. (Mackinder, 1910: 64) ¹⁹

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Figure 12:

Illustrations from Eight Lectures on India, 2nd edition (London: Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee and George Philip and Son, 1910) (c) British Library Board General Reference Collection 010055.de.58.Asia, Pacific & Africa IOL.1947.a.1706 p 54–55.

This pairing of the burning body on the ghat and the loyal veteran standing guard at the gate, as well as its placement on the flip side of the portraits of the fakir and the snake charmers, suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between these photographs: a study of the differences between what mutinous and loyal subjects look like, and a reminder of the life-and-death repercussions of these imperial allegiances.

This is, admittedly, a nuanced connection to make between Fisher’s photographs. For any of the student viewers of the COVIC lectures on India to make these interpretive leaps would require imaginative readings of these images and a careful attention to how the different photographs were meant to speak to one another across the lectures and in dialogue with current events. ²⁰ If the COVIC lectures were intended as a form of imperial propaganda, in this case they are certainly subtle in their messaging. But the strategy of implying meanings through comparisons, of leaving the significance of a depicted space unsaid, was a common solution to the unrepresentability of the mutiny itself, as Zahid R. Chaudhary (2012) suggests in his study of post-mutiny photographs in India. Since cameras were not present at the major events of the rebellion (camera technology still being too slow to capture the moment of battle), most depictions of the mutiny were made retrospectively, either through drawings by witnesses, or by photographers who sought to recreate scenes from oral accounts. These images fulfilled a memorial as well as documentary function. Chaudhary notes that British photographers who represented the events of the mutiny felt the need to go back to the literal space of death to record the scene, ‘yet what they record is blankness, the void, or emptiness. In these photographs the object of the frame is absence itself, and so the images strive toward allegory in their depiction of loss’ (2012: 40). This tension between what could, or in many cases, could not be seen in photographs ‘of’ the mutiny and the complicated narratives invested in them by texts suggests for Chaudhary that colonial photography always engages in a play of surface revelation and concealment: He writes:

What interests me is this apophatic impulse at the heart of colonial photography that precisely cannot be explained away. Such a play of exposure and concealment, naming and unsaying, may well lie at the heart of all photography. (2012: 69)

When photographers chose to depict the blank spaces left behind after the ‘atrocities’ committed by insurgent Indian subjects, it was the bodies of dead British colonists that went concealed and unrepresented, conjured in the minds of viewers rather than explicitly pictured. For others, such as Fisher, representations of post-mutiny India were designed to document everyday life in the colony – both to demonstrate that the status quo of colonial rule had been re-established and, as both Pinney (1997) and Wagner (2013) suggest, to build a catalogue of collective allegiances that might foretell future insurrections. In these images, it is loss itself that goes unrepresented, covered over by images of effective colonial management and modern imperial production.

As the students’ imaginary journey through India continued to Cawnpore, the COVIC lecture returned to its message of imperial citizenship, drawing attention to the ways that Indian subjects contribute their labour to the strength of the empire. In a series of views of an army factory, for instance, cloth-cutters are seen crouched over an enormous expanse of khaki, working to cut patterns for uniforms that the lectures tell us are part of an order for 33,000 coats for the police in Hyderabad (Figure 13). ‘Both the spinning of the yarn and the weaving of kharki cloth’, Mackinder’s text tells the audience, ‘have been accomplished by native labour and British machinery at Cawnpore’ (1910: 58). A few images later, in a tour of the boot shop of a ‘leather factory for making Government boots and army equipment’, the lecture texts ask the viewer to note that the boots are being sewn by hand. Here, Fisher’s depiction of workers squatting along the floor, making everything by hand, shows the ‘native characteristics’ that Mackinder sought to depict in the lectures, contrasting it with the modern British forms of production that have been adapted from the ‘Mother Country’. But Fisher’s photographs of figures kneeling on the factory floor imply another kind of adaptation, this time to a position of subjugation to British rule. The textbook’s reference to the destination of these goods – to be used by the police in Hyderabad and by the government army – reinforces this reading. In Cawnpore, the site of one of the bloodiest confrontations between Sepoy and British forces, the local population is seen to be quietly paying for their disloyalty 50 years later, represented here through their work to literally outfit the forces they once opposed. Images of the mutiny and its aftermath therefore constitute the shadow archive to the COVIC photographs of India, one that haunts the geography lessons with another set of lessons about loyalty, disobedience, and retribution.

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Figure 13:

A. Hugh Fisher, Native cutters making clothes for British Troops, Cawnpore, India, 1908, half plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album IV, no. 630. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

The COVIC lectures’ representation of Indian figures as currently docile but potentially problematic, as ghosts of the colonial past and spectres of a post-colonial future, is the first in what would become a trope: a concern with containing the latent political force of subjects by shaping them into productive and pliable citizens. Towards the end of the lectures on India, as the imagined journey moves westward into what is now Pakistan, two photographs of students in a Government High School in Peshawar are used to demonstrate the ways that schooling and the defence of the empire are intertwined. In the first, a long row of young men, most wearing turbans, stand in front of a low, one-storey building (Figure 14). Lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, they face the camera and, with outstretched arms, point the viewer’s gaze to another male student performing a handstand on two balance bars in the foreground. While, in another context, this demonstration of physical strength and fitness might have been interpreted as a potential threat to colonial rule (one imagines a depiction of a snake charmer performing the same gesture would have easily read as a call to insurgency), in the space of a school it is framed as a testament to the successes of British education on the colonial periphery. As the lecture texts explain:

Here in Peshawar, on the very border of British rule, it is interesting to see the progress of western education. This is the Government High School. A class is in the playground under gymnastic instruction. The boys are mostly Musulmans, though a few Hindus may be distinguished by their caps in the place of turbans. (Mackinder, 1910: 123)

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Figure 14:

A. Hugh Fisher, Government High School, Peshawar: Gymnastic class in playground - this is the highest Form - Mohammedans except four Hindoos (wearing caps), India, 1908, half plate. From Fisher photographs, RCS Fisher Album VI, no. 819. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Here, on the border of India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan, religious differences are noted (but are so unstable that they require a mode of dress to distinguish between the two groups), and then smoothed over by the processes of colonial education, which transform the subjects’ violent and mutinous potential (suggested a few pages beforehand by the snake charmer in Benares) into imperial loyalty. Fisher’s photograph of the gym class in Peshawar weaves the various narrative threads of the COVIC project together into one image: the role of state education in producing citizens, anxieties about national efficiency brushing up against fears of a potentially insurgent indigenous population, and the importance of training the spectator to recognize this as a scene of imperial citizenship. Fisher’s photographs could construct a catalogue of colonial subjects, but to understand these figures as imperial citizens required rhetorical gymnastics on the part of Mackinder’s texts, and the affective work of the viewer, who had to imagine herself to be similar to the people being projected on the screen despite all the differences – in class, gender, religion, and especially race – that she was also asked to see.

Flexible Citizenship ²¹

How, then, were students supposed to understand the diverse subjects of the India lectures as figures of imperial citizenship? Are they rebellious insurgents now safely contained as citizens? Or do they constitute potential threats to imperial unity, lying in wait for the right moment for nationalist insurrection, which even education is not guaranteed to correct? The COVIC committee did not have clear answers to these questions: it is evident that these uncertainties about what it meant to look and to feel like an imperial citizen are what defined it as a category of belonging in the first place. Like contemporary notions of universal human rights, imperial citizenship was imagined in the abstract. When it had to be realized, concretized, and represented in specific places and times, it was inevitably marked by contingency and contradiction. The lecture scheme’s originary moment of reception – the stuffy classroom in Hong Kong in 1907 – demonstrates that these contradictions were not only conceptual, but embodied. By asking viewers to set aside the physical constraints of their immediate environment and imagine themselves elsewhere and with others, the COVIC lectures staged citizenship as a transportive, imaginary, and fundamentally visual experience. As Banerjee (2012) argues, such a doubling or splitting of experience might characterize the practices of citizenship more generally. Despite its promise as a universal and formal equality, she writes, ‘the effects of citizenship [are] always double and partial’ (Banerjee, 2012: 11).

This interplay between each subject’s intersectional differences and their place within the wider imagined community of the empire is what makes the COVIC project such a rich area of analytic inquiry for studies of visual citizenship. Rather than homogenizing differences between subjects, as we might expect hegemonic power structures to do, the COVIC project highlighted them, showing the capaciousness of imperial citizenship in accommodating (certain kinds of) agency. The flexible framework that could safely contain these differences was a worldview of the empire as densely interconnected, an imagined global community with a rightful place for each subject. In many ways, the COVIC project’s depiction of the empire foreshadows early 21st-century discourses of the global citizen, a notion that also relies on photographs to shore up an otherwise invisible category of belonging. But where the global citizen is created in the supposedly immaterial spaces of digital image-making and streaming video, COVIC’s imperial citizen is shaped through the viewing practices she learns in the space of the classroom. Perhaps most importantly, the colonial subjects pictured in the COVIC lectures had to be seen to be participating in this education in imperial citizenship of their own accord: they had to be willing citizens, not coerced subjects. The inverse of the imperial citizen was the colonial slave labourer, a figure who reappears throughout Fisher’s photographs, haunting the notion of the sovereign imperial citizen (Moser, 2017).

The moments of contradiction in the narrative of imperial citizenship that I have charted in the COVIC lectures on India are not failures in the project’s ability to persuade its viewers, but constitutive of the kinds of knowledge it tried to produce. Photographic archives such as COVIC were produced in an effort to make epistemic distinctions, to ‘see’ racial and imperial categories that did not yet exist. But this knowledge, as the lecture images and texts show, was – much like imperial citizenship itself – tentative and precarious. The COVIC project’s acknowledgement of the contingencies of photographic meaning, and the flexibility of a term like imperial citizenship – a category that accommodates snake charmers alongside students, fakirs as well as uniform-makers – also made it a tool of anti-colonial resistance as the lectures continued to circulate in classrooms as late as 1945. As a researcher in the archive, my interest is in developing the critical possibilities of these photographs further, of imagining how spectators may have re-instrumentalized them to demand the promises of imperial citizenship be realized.