Memories of Belonging can be read as a collection of slightly offbeat musings on certain aspects of over a century and a half of India's history. Whether the photograph, lithograph, painting or cartoon is the focus or illustrates a point or an argument, the visual is integral to each piece.
A rough historical sense divides the volume into three sections: the first sets the stage for the appearance of the colonial state not through the usual tropes of political and economic domination but more with vignettes about institutions, people and unusual choices. The second section is a whimsical journey through the country while the final section is all about modes of travel used by a century and a half of people on the move, beginning with the palki and ending with experiences of the railways. Through its easy style, well-chosen visuals and details peppered with anecdotes, the reader will quickly journey through colonial India into its more recent past, garnering interesting and often little-known facts and snippets along the way.
MALAVIKA KARLEKAR has been a university teacher, researcher, editor and, since 2001, curator of archival photographs. Educated at the Universities of Delhi and Oxford, she is co-editor, Indian Journal of Gender Studies and curator, Re-presenting Indian Women: 1875-1947: A Visual Documentary, both at Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi. Dr Karlekar writes a regular column for The Telegraph (Kolkata), often focussing on the archival visual.
Her recent books are Re-visioning the Past Early Photography in Bengal (2005), Visualizing Indian Women (2005) and Visual Histories Photography in the Popular Imagination (2013). She lives in New Delhi and in Ramgarh (Kumaon) with her husband and four dogs and is an avid - though not always successful.
It is not unusual for serendipity to help imaginations and activate creative spaces. Memories of early rambles through albums and loose collections of family photographs and then, in one's adolescence, an introduction to the work of Thomas and William Daniell, resurfaced many decades later. From the 1990s, fascination with the 19th-century visual led me to owners of much-loved family photographs and to trawls through flea markets and second-hand shops abroad: whether it was a hole-in-the-corner shop by the side of the escalator owned by an elderly expatriate in Singapore, weekend flea markets in Jaffa, New York, Washington and Oxford or established bookshops in Cambridge, I've rarely come away without an old lithograph or map. By 2000, a more than aesthetic interest in the visual medium encouraged me to explore the social and historical context of some of these images and others that I started collecting or observing in books, albums and exhibitions resulting in a series of short articles for the Opinion page of the Kolkata-based The Telegraph.
In some cases, the visual became the focus of the article. In others, it illustrated a point or an argument. When I've embedded meaning into visual imagery, I've done so against the backdrop of memoirs and travelogues, known as well as obscure, more than 'received' histories and accounts. If I found Bishop Heber's well-known Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India useful in its discussion of places, people and travel, I've also gleaned from Kamala Bose's Atmajibani, fascinating in its account of a young bride of the 1880s' life at camp. Unlike Heber's commercially published two volumes, when she died, Kamala's memoirs were printed by her family.
The 1850s was a momentous decade for India. Not only did governance by Britain change hands but also several new innovations and insitutions from the West found their way here some only a few years after their discovery. The camera, postage stamp, telegraph, Morse code, the university and railway systems were among the more significant. Others, such as the hill station and the bungalow were concepts developed in the colony - to be adapted later in other parts of various imperial edifices. Hybridity that characterised the colonial encounter resonated in the world of the arts, the interface resulting in many interesting offerings and interpretations.
By the middle of the 19th century, visual representation as a source of information became an important component of the colonial enterprise in India. For the British, relating to the alien land meant balancing the quest for similarities with the principle of difference needed to govern. That cartography, epigraphy and dactylography depended on visuals of different kinds gave a certain salience to non-textual evidence in governance. Woodcuts, copper and later, steel plate engravings were popular methods of reproducing lithographic images.
Paintings by Europeans landscapes as well as portraits - lithographs and sketches of India had an early history beginning with the 18th-century tours of Tilly Kettle and William Hodges. The most reputed were Thomas Daniell and his young nephew William who acted as a diligent assistant in preparing drawings and sketches for his landscape artist and engraver uncle. Their best known work, the six part Oriental Scenery, consisted of 144 aquatints based on hundreds of drawings made during the Daniells' visit to India beginning in 1786. If these were accessible more by the cognoscenti, the popular domain too was soon using images as the basis for cartoons and the ironic was a part of the early history of the visual. Its role in publicising the colonial state and its work was substantial. Yet, not much attention was given to this form of creativity except of course through the pages of the likes of Punch and The Illustrated London News. By the 1890s, touristy picture postcards started appearing.
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