Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India

Description

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of ‘cities of light’ and ‘hearts of darkness’ coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies. Colophon Contents List of plates List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire Part I: Technologies of illumination 1 Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta 2 Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Part II: ‘Visibility is a trap’: battles of the veil 3 ‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism [Illustrations] 4 Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed Part III: Chiaroscuro, portraiture and subjectivity 5 Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings 6 Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Postscript Bibliography Index