Cheroots

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Originally published in exposure, Journal of the Society of Photographic Education, Volume 36:1, 10-22, 2003

Of Cheroots and Current Coins
Reconsidering the Photography of Colonial India
(an excerpt)

For Chris Chekuri

A decade after photography's 1844 introduction into the Indian subcontinent (which occurred within five years of its announcement in Europe), the East India Company and (after 1857) the Imperial Government began to embrace photography as a state-of-the-art technology for topographical, military and archeological surveys, government projects, and general documentary purposes. The plans hatched for photographic projects are striking in their recognition of the medium's usefulness as a technology of imperial power. In 1855, for example, the Company began instructing cadets in photography at its Military Seminary at Addiscombe, and also civil engineers in the keeping of photographic records of public works projects. Other official uses of photographs included a project to photograph Indian pensioners for identification purposes—in order to circumvent the problem of impersonation (a plan ultimately resisted by the Accountant-General on the grounds of its high cost). In the same year, the Company recommended that the Bombay Government discontinue the use of draughtsmen for natural-historical, archeological, and architectural renderings, from which directive stemmed the well-known photographic surveys of the antiquities of southern and eastern India by Captain John Gill and later Captain Linnaeus Tripe. In 1856, Dr. Norman Cheevers, Secretary to the Medical Board at Fort William in Calcutta, proposed the application of photography to criminological investigation, specifically the use of photographs of murder scenes which were to be shown to suspects on the theory that if guilty, they would show an aversion to seeing the site of their crime. In 1857, the commercial photographers Johnson and Henderson launched the monthly Indian Amateurs' Photographic Album, which further stimulated both commercial and governmental photographic activity.
If it is true that the overwhelming majority of photographs from nineteenth-century colonial India were made by and for the colonial government and commercial firms in what may be called, somewhat euphemistically, governed cultural encounters, then we can ask: does the history of photography in colonial India trace the trajectory seemingly promised by these early proposals, a trajectory of acquisition, identification, control, and punishment? With what success is the photography of colonial India an enactment of the authority of the institutions and individuals commissioning the images? With what success does it visually deploy the tropes of colonial supremacism?
My concern here is not to rehearse the already familiar argument that the colonial archive cannot be called visual evidence in some denuded state, that we are not at liberty to position ourselves as passive "viewers" of photographs, secure in an essentially confirmative or information-gleaning approach to discrete pictures of the colonial world. Indeed, we are, after a generation of post-structuralist criticism, now fundamentally readers of photographs, not viewers—readers who cannot help but see the archive of colonial images as a visual aspect of colonial discourse, and also of a discourse that invests camera-made images with unique powers of evidence.
If, however, what pictures show has become largely a matter of what pictures say, we may legitimately ask how and how well photographs name the vagaries of discipline and desire that formed the colonial gaze, how and how well they articulate the codes by which the archive as a whole positions the viewer to receive an ideology legitimating colonial power. My concern, then, is to examine in some detail how pictures from the colonial archive actually perform the conceits that so deeply inform them. I wish to show how certain crucial photographs embedded in the discourse of colonial power perform their conceits badly, indeed so badly that they tear at the very discourse they are charged to proclaim. Looking closely at admittedly disparate and sometimes forgotten photographs—government sanctioned ethnographic photographs and diaristic snapshot photographs—I wish to point to a slippage between the fantasies and the realities of political control through photographs.
Although these photographs, in the original contexts of their presentation and reception, were understood as evidence of social reality in British India, in hindsight we can see rather more clearly the ways that they serve neither colonial will nor colonial desire. They fail in this regard in at least three senses. First, the "literal" content of the photographs very often qualifies and sometimes subverts the evidence as construed in the terms of colonial knowledge. Instead of recording human subjects as ethnographic or social data, or fusing human subjects with ritual and artifactual indices of social knowledge, the photographs actually betray a range of disciplinary efforts involved in their production, and hence a range of perspectives on the power differential between photographer and subject, colonizer and colonized. Second, British colonial photography, like much photography meant to be evidentiary, does not set forth a singular or unambiguous conceptualization of how to read photographs as evidence. The variety of photographic gestures, tropes and practices that we find in the colonial photographs demands extensive interpretation in order to know the images in the mode of evidence. The particularly "photographic" character of these images—realistic yet fragmentary, specific yet polysemous, immediate yet remote—does not rescue them as evidence, rather it haunts their status as evidence. Third, the inconsistent and, indeed, inconstant use of photographs in colonial texts suggests that British photographers and writers—and by extension the colonial discourse itself—sensed these difficulties, and so did not turn to photography to articulate colonial truth and colonial prerogative in a thorough or rigorous manner.
My hope, broadly, is to read these photographs for what we can learn from their ellipses, their indeterminacies, their deferrals and omissions. I wish to treat them as images that generate beliefs about content, beliefs particular to ourselves as an audience, and beliefs that we can interrogate for the ways they interpret and seemingly inscribe their material.

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