Organizer and Chair: Julie F. Codell, Arizona State University

Discussant: Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Hunter College, Canada

Using the huge production of photographs, postcards and memorabilia made officially and commercially for the coronation durbars in Delhi (1877, 1903, 1911), this panel will examine photographic images of Indians and by Indians from this event in the larger context of the cultural industry of photography in India.  Panelists will explore how photographs conveyed complex cultural and political ideals, and projected Indian images into a modern temporality, despite clichéd colonial representations of Indians as "medieval" and "primitive."  Panelists will examine a range of photographic images from the high art photographs of Lala Deen Dayal and "official" photographic portraits of maharajahs to the popular postcard photographs of India that were so prodigious and circulated throughout a global market.  Panelists will explore how photographs represented Indians and, at the same time, troubled the representation of Indians, and how Indian photographers and Indian photographic subjects intervened in these representations to shape their self-images and the images of India in general.  The panelists are from several disciplines, so papers will offer multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analyses of Indian photography from several disciplinary perspectives (historical, aesthetic, sociological, anthropological) and from several methodological analyses engaging topics of gender, race, reception, post/colonial theory, and visual culture.  These multiple perspectives and analyses will serve to stimulate active discussion with the audience, instigated by our commentator, the editor of Traces of India, a major book on photography in India.  Our panel combines junior and senior scholars and panelists come from institutions from the east coast and the far west.

Gita Rajan, Hamilton College

This paper examines the manner in which Lala Deen Dayal used photography to create a spectacle wherein colonized India could be read alongside Imperial Britain. He composed scenes of Indian princes alongside British civil servants in a style that mimicked imperial splendor, and thus subversively showcased alternative modernities at the heart of colony. Imitating, but also interpreting Queen Victoria’s coronation scenes from London to capture the mood of the Delhi Durbars, Deen Dayal used the camera as a tool of resistance to show both the technological modernity of India and to gesture towards the ability of colonized people’s ability for self-governance. Deen Dayal re-routed the logic of the Queen’s coronation scenes as Empress of India to visually document the pageantry of the Durbar scenes, which points to the radical possibility of independent, Indian self-rule. Unlike the orientalized images of European photographers who continued to project India as "other," Deen Dayal’s work can be read as historical documents in a traditional register just as easily as it can be seen as subverting imperial rule in another register. 

Julie F. Codell, Arizona State University

In this paper I will survey relevant photographic portraiture types and conventions in India, as a contest for photographic portraits of prominent Indians for official display and government publications to examine and compare/contrast the oriental display of the princes in photographs by Bourne and Shepherd in 1877 with portraits negotiating modern Indian princes by Deen Dayal (1903) and with the images of the princes as pillars of society with masculine identities by Higgins and Herzog and others (1911). I will also include some examples of maharajah photographic portraits made in England when maharajahs visited the UK and were photographed at the Lafayette Studios.  I will examine how the maharajahs constructed their identities through late-19th-and early 20th-century photographs of themselves to negotiate modern public images and resist the imposition of commodified identities constructed for them by colonial forces to use historical ideologies to justify Raj policies.  My analyses will draw on several topics and approaches to assess the photographs within conventions and traditions of Indian royal portraiture, in the context of colonial politics in both British India and in Natives States, and in the context of some archival and biographical information for 1 or 2 case studies of these maharajahs.

Saloni Mathur, University of California, Los Angeles

The Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911 were widely represented on colonial picture postcards, generating a frenzy of activity among postcard enthusiasts during the heyday of this peculiar visual form.  I will examine the phenomenon of Durbar images in relation to colonial picture postcards which also were used to depict Indians and famous sites, and focus in particular on their status as fashionable souvenir objects of the era.  By considering the collectibility of Durbar postcards and their complex circuits of travel, I suggest that contradictions inherent in this mass-produced imagery inadvertently make visible the excesses of British rule in South Asia.