Abstract
Malavika Karlekar’s essays on photography have been appearing in The Telegraph of Calcutta for some years now. Those essays are now gathered together, along with a new introduction, in this tidy volume.
The essays cover a period of roughly a 100 years, between the introduction of the camera to India in the mid-nineteenth century through the photography of the first decades of independence. That corresponds with Karlekar’s established period of interest in the history of India. There are two broad sections in the book: ‘The Colonial Eye’ and ‘Imaging India.’ Interestingly enough, the imagery of the post-Nehruvian period is not covered in the latter section, which deals substantially with Indian agendas of representation. It can be argued, of course, that the author did not set out to write a comprehensive history of photography in India. At the same time, to group the 1940s and 1950s with the colonial, rather than the postcolonial, is an ideological statement that might have been unpacked quite rewardingly. On a related note, the book also leaves the reader wishing that Karlekar had thought through the cultural and social implications of the hyper-ubiquity of photography in the age of the cell-phone camera, compared to a time—not very long ago—when cameras were rare in middle-class Indian homes (not to mention those of the poor), and every photograph was ‘special’. It is not, after all, that we have gone from ‘posing for pictures’ to ‘being natural’. We have gone to acting natural, that is, posing differently, and that enacted difference is surely significant to historians of culture.
The strongest essays in the volume deal with the photographic record of domesticity in India. For a writer who has shown great interest and analytical skill in the area of public photography, Karlekar is highly sensitive to what the camera indicates about historical shifts in Indian familiality: how children are dressed in family portraits, how close the husband stands to the wife, whether she has her hand on his shoulder and so on. In these small details, we can see the evolution of modern Indian subjectivity. We can see, simultaneously, the history of gender norms in modern India, as women emerged from the zenana into the photo studio, the living room and then public space. Indeed, Karlekar presents the photograph itself as a preliminary public space, one that has bridged the proverbial gap between the home and the world in India since the Victorian era. Likewise, the author is attentive to the evolving rituals of the studio, pointing out the delicate and unstable balance of power between the posing subject and the authoritative photographer, which reflected other balances of power in society: race, class, gender and professional standing.
The great weakness of the volume is the relative paucity of reproduced photographs. Much of the time, the author resorts to describing photographs, which is not an effective method of communicating detail and nuance (in fairness, it should be conceded that acquiring the right to reproduce images hoarded by imperial archives can be prohibitively expensive). At times, the photographs themselves fall out of the analysis, serving merely as excuses for Karlekar to narrate the lives and circumstances of the person involved in their production. Karlekar also tries, every so often, to guess what people might have been thinking when they were photographed, which is unproductive and somewhat annoying. The issue of class is not addressed rigorously: there is a persistent tendency to use the term ‘middle class’ when the author is writing about a much more prosperous segment of society (race and gender, on the other hand, are dealt with sensitively). And finally, there are embarrassing factual errors: the Ilbert Bill (1883) could not have contributed to Rajendralal Mitra’s difficulties with Anglo-Indian society circa 1857 (pp. 44–45), Felice Beato could not have come to India through the Suez Canal in 1858 (p. 54) since the canal opened only in 1869, and the American Civil War came after, not before, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (p. 149).
All the same, this is an engaging and thoughtful collection, which should be of interest to a general readership as well as social historians of modern India, and, of course, to those with a particular interest in the history of photography.