VISUAL HISTORIES: Photography in the Popular Imagination

Not much is known about how the coming of photography changed visual discourse or affected peoples lives. This volume documents sucha history through photographs and the history of photographs in India.

Divided into two sections, the thirty-two essays, illustrated with archival photographs, look at the camera in the colonial era and in post-Independence India. The fi rst section looks at photography through The Colonial Eye— with the camera and the studio becoming necessaryprostheses in the new engagement between the colonized and the rulers in the nineteenth century. Europeans—of whom the British werethe largest in number—were the initial users of the photographic studio and early studio images of the sahib—civil servant, lawyer, teaplanter, missionary, and so on—are among the fi rst available visuals. Soon, the memsahib appeared at the sahibs side with or without selfconscious offspring. From around the end of the 1850s, as the Indian urban middle class started patronizing photographic studios, thesebecame instrumental in fracturing notions of space and visibility: where the use of public space was governed by the discriminatory practicesof race and gender, the photographic studio became a shared locale. Imaging India, the second section of the volume, looks at some suchmoments as well as takes the viewer to Independence and the years beyond.